C'lick Me

A NETPORN STUDIES READER
Edited by Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Matteo Pasquinelli


COLOPHON
C’Lick Me:
A Netporn Studies Reader
Editors: Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, This publication is licensed under the
Matteo Pasquinelli Creative Commons Attribution Non
Editorial Assistance: Geert Lovink, Commercial Non Derivative Works 2.5
Sabine Niederer Netherlands License
Copy Editing: Wietske Maas To view a copy of this license, visit:
Design: Kernow Craig http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Printer: Drukkerij Veenman, Amsterdam by-nc-nd/2.5/nl/deed.en
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures
Supported by: Paradiso, Amsterdam No article in this reader may be reproduced
in any form by any electronic or mechanical
ISBN: 978-90-78146-03-2 means without permission in writing from the
author.
The C’Lick Me Reader is the
second in the INC Reader series. We would like to thank all the participants of
The first INC Reader was: the conferences ‘Art and Politics of Netporn’
Incommunicado Reader (2005) (2005) and ‘C’Lick Me’ (2007). A special
Editors: Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle thanks to our director, Emilie Randoe, School
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures of Interactive Media, Amsterdam Polytech-
Supported by: Hivos nic, for supporting our netporn research pro-
Web: www.networkcultures.org/ gramme; to Pierre Ballings and Maarten van
incommunicado Boven, Paradiso, Amsterdam, for hosting the
C’Lick Me event and supporting the produc-
Contact tion of the reader. Thanks to all the authors
Institute of Network Cultures of the book for collaborating with us over the
phone: +3120 5951863 years, as well as to all the photographers and
fax: +3120 5951840 image-producers on the web whose works have
email: info@networkcultures.org been cited in the different articles.
web: www.networkcultures.org
Order a copy of this book by sending an email

to: info@networkcultures.org
A PDF of this publication can be downloaded

freely at
www.networkcultures.org/mediaarchive
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Section 1: The Rise of the Netporn Society
Regina Lynn
Sex Drive: Where Sex and Tech Come Together 7
Mark Dery
Naked Lunch: Talking Realcore with Sergio Messina 17
Nishant Shah
PlayBlog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace 31
Audacia Ray
Sex on the Open Market: Sex Workers Harness the Power of the Internet 45
Adam Arvidsson
Netporn: the Work of Fantasy in the Information Society 69
Manuel Bonik and Andreas Schaale

The Naked Truth: Internet Eroticism and the Search 77
Tim Noonan
Netporn, Sexuality and the Politics of Disability:
A Catalyst for Access, Inclusion and Acceptance? 89
Matthew Zook
Report on the Location of the Internet Adult Industry 103
Section 2: Digital Desire beyond Pornography
Mark Dery
Paradise Lust: Pornotopia Meets the Culture Wars 125
Matteo Pasquinelli
Warporn! Warpunk: Autonomous Videopoiesis in Wartime 149
Florian Cramer and Stewart Home
Pornographic Coding 159
Florian Cramer
Sodom Blogging: Alternative Porn and Aesthetic Sensibility 171
Mikita Brottman
Nightmares in Cyberspace:
Urban Legends, Moral Panics and the Dark Side of the Net 177
Michael Goddard
BBW: Techno-archaism, Excessive Corporeality and Network Sexuality 187
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

The Obsession of the (Vanishing) Body 197
SECTION 3: Netporn after the Queer Boom
Mireille Miller-Young
Sexy and Smart: Black Women and the Politics of Self-Authorship in Netporn 205
Katrien Jacobs
Porn Arousal and Gender Morphing in the Twilight Zone 217
Barbara DeGenevieve
Ssspread.com: The Hot Bods of Queer Porn 233
Julie Levin Russo

‘The Real Thing’: Reframing Queer Pornography for Virtual Spaces 239
Samantha Culp
First Porn Son: Asian-man.com and the Golden Porn Revolution 253
Francesco Macarone Palmieri aka Warbear

21st Century Schizoid Bear: Masculine transitions Through Net Pornography 261

Tim Stüttgen
Ten Fragments on a Cartography of Post-Pornographic Politics 277
BIOGRAPHIES 285
WEBOGRAPHY 291

INTRODUCTION
The conferences ‘The Art and Politics of Netporn’ (2005) and ‘C’Lick Me’ (2007), are
novel zones for academics, activists and artists to discuss and experience new phenomena
around web-based sex and pornography. We are part of a porn-friendly, yet critical digi-
tal generation, bothered by a cultural climate of narrow-mindedness and porn hysteria.
Critical studies about pornography and queer activism have been carried out in previous
decades, but we are looking to discuss our tactile immersion in pornographic networks.
The Institute of Network Cultures agreed to launch such a space on an international
level, providing an uncensored environment for exhibiting and analysing various kinds of
netporn through conferences, a mailinglist and tagging area, a festival page on Myspace.
com, and now a book publication. There is a sense of intellectual and social urgency
around netporn, a need to awaken media activism and intellectual sharing to process
these pornographic realms. It is indeed difficult to get public funding to support our
events, but it is also a matter of challenging the now palpable mentality of fear of the oth-
er and the stuffiness that followed supposedly moral conflicts and geo-political warfare.
As we have witnessed in recent porn controversies in cultures as diverse as China
and the Netherlands, the authorities are wary of courting pornography research as a valid
contribution to open or activist media culture. It remains a risky endeavour to examine
pornography, even though the last two years have seen a wider range of porn studies initia-
tives. Perhaps our objectives are now able to enter mainstream society and become more
acceptable again, but global anti-porn movements are also on the rise. We can surely keep
developing porn discourses, but what about our initial desire to break open a new kind of
public zone of consumption and debate? We see netporn as a site where all our major po-
litical tensions and gender wars come to light, but our impetus to air tensions and support
a post-utopian quest for pleasure and media awareness will remain controversial.
Our two conferences propose to expand the definition of pornography. A similar re-
vision of the narrow articulation of porn has been carried out by the participants of the
Post-Porn Politics conference in Berlin in October 2006. Our contribution started out
as a similar search for innovative bodily aesthetics and queer or feminist expressions, but
has been mainly centered on an analysis of new technologies. Pornography is not seen
as a fatally beckoning commodity, nor as queer counter-culture, but as accessible elec-
tronic data that can be modified by social actions, communications and relationships.
Netporn’s agency can contain a critique of commercial work ethics and gender roles,
C’Lick Me
it also actively seeks out circuits of DIY online eroticism. What we emphasise in porn
culture is alternative body type tolerance and amorphous queer sexuality, interesting art
works and the writerly blogosphere, visions of grotesque sex and warpunk activism; all
agencies relying on robust sex energies for their different purposes. These netporn play-
ers also breed abundant or obsessive behaviours — lurking, seducing, up/downloading,
chatting, mutual masturbation, dating and orgy-swinging. But the general economy of
their actions only mimics the exchange economy and people get hooked as they engage
in free trading and act out their specific sexual desires. As Bataille said, general econo-
mies are based on the notion of excess where a surplus of data and information can only
be channelled in a performative manner. Hence, we see modes of mimicry and play as a
self-aware and ritualised enactment of a culture’s high point of exuberance, ecstasy and
intensity. Hence we focus on a society of excess and atomised small players rather than
giant industries or singular porn stars.
It is also about the participation of women and feminists and the transformation of
queer identities. Minority groups such as (post) feminists, queers and ethnic minorities
use porn as a contribution to their social networks. By doing so they create a stance against
the industries that have been influencing the porn experience until now. We investigate
the role of ‘gender fluid’ entrepreneurism and web communities, and ask ourselves if
gender queerness represents a new marketing devices or an actual sexual behaviour and
sensibility. The ability of women and sexual minorities to participate in the porn indus-
try without the intervention of a (typically male) third hand has had profound implica-
tions for the industry as a whole. But what is the next step after this kind of liberation?
We have witnessed a transformation of the notion of queer agency, not only because
straight, lesbian and transgendered producers try to cater to the masses, but because
consumerism now involves acts of gender morphing and cross-voyeurism. A cross-voyeur
is a person of a peculiar sexual taste or subculture who is tempted to try out an odd or
incompatible taste or subculture. Why do we see a rise of these kinds of disorderly tastes
and desires? Rather than seeing queer culture as driven by a search for bonding and com-
munity activism, it could also be seen as the continuation of the philosophical traditions
of Bataille and de Sade, both of whom meticulously evoked sex scenes that would have
uneasy effects on potential partners. In Eroticism and Tears of Eros, Bataille shows that
erotic sensibilities have an undercurrent of attraction to scenes and rituals of sacrifice and
death. In the writings of de Sade, we witness detailed descriptions of hyperbolic actions
which simply bewilder sex partners, or simply undercut the known positions of fearful
psychology. Alfonso Lingis describes these reactions to seductions as “deadly pleasures”
or voluptuous emotions.1 They are the kind of indescribable convulsive needling that
arguably also underlies adventurous pornographic browsing. For instance, in his essay
“21st Century Schizoid Bear,” Francesco Palmieri depicts a similar voluptuous pleasure
as both a gay man and bear when he is turned on by somebody that he would normally
reject. He describes an encounter with a fat and hairy person who turns him on yet upon
closer investigation, turns out to be a female-born person or trans-bear. He describes this
encounter as a sublime moment in which the trans-bear’s complex appearance lifts him
INTRODUCTION
into a hightened state of terror and pleasure. Palmieri wonders if and how this process of
finding others ever comes to an end? Or how does it reach a limit?
Alongside developments of cross-voyeurism, FTM porn stars such as Buck Angel,
have taken an active part in appropriating porn stardom and making seductive appear-
ances for uninitiated persons Buck’s growing success is not only a new networking of porn
zones, but a call for average straight viewers to question and design their own genders and
sexual tastes. As Barbara DeGenevieve writes in “The Hot Bods of Queer Porn,” these
sex acts engage viewers with performative mutations or multilayered parodies of gender.
These are examples of netporn producers and consumers who trade services while
developing novel chemistries. But one of the biggest stumbling blocks is the new anti-
porn tide that implies a climate of global crime and punishment. Regardless of waves
of democratisation within the Internet porn industry, the porn boom is also causing an
enormous backlash to autonomous sex communities. The Chinese government is setting
an example by actively banning the most fertile web cultures; the youthful sex bloggers
and policiticised admins of bulletin boards, or occasionally shutting down all traffic tak-
ing place in cyber cafés. We should also be critical of the legalese antiporn terms and
conditions underlying the extremely popular western digital networks such as myspace.
com. For instance, for the C’Lick Me conference we opened a page on Myspace.com to
gather online friends and momentum for the event. This turned out to be a success, as
many people linked to our page. However, it also became clear that the legal parameters
of myspace.com are profoundly anti-porn. Any time one uploads a photo, one receives
the following warning message: “Photos may not contain nudity, violent or offensive ma-
terial, or copyrighted images. If you violate these terms your account will be deleted.”
When uploading a video, the antiporn warning is even more blatant, as the message
reads: “If you upload porn or unauthorized copyrighted material, your MySpace.com
account will be deleted.
Again, netporn is cornered by a legalistic paranoiac or reactionary puritanical mind-
set. This threat closes the definition of pornography — as if we already exactly understand
the definition of pornography. It is a bit of a contradiction to carry out open porn activism
within these kind of networks. How do we as the “myspace generation” see the exchange
zone between virtual eroticism and a material-public display of porn? Our sense has al-
ways been that we needed to break out of the Internet for reasons that were not always
clear: porn excess, media exhaustion, death of radical media culture. Does myspace an-
nounce the moment where we desire an Internet without porn? Do we need to bring
porn back to the movie theatres so we can start relaxing and masturbating again? What
can we do with netporn in this play zone of our conferences and festivals? The modes of
reply to these questions are further developed by our participants and authors, and have
shown that porn networks do not yet belong to one or two giant corporations.
NOTE
1 Alfonso Lingis, “Deadly Pleasures”, in Deepak Sawhney (ed.) Must we Burn Sade?
New York, Prometheus Books, p. 32.
SECTION 1
THE RISE OF THE NETPORN SOCIETY

SEX DRIVE:
WHERE SEX AND TECH COME TOGETHER
Regina Lynn
Every week I expose myself to a hundred thousand people online and invite them to dis-
cuss it in a public forum.
They don’t love me for my body. Hell, some of them don’t love me at all. But they come
back each week because they know they’ll find a geek’s-eye view of sex. If nothing else,
I give them something to think about over the weekend.
It’s a challenge, and I love it.
I started writing Sex Drive in early 2003 as a companion to TechTV’s documentary se-
ries Wired for Sex. TechTV was reaching out to a more mainstream audience, and the
web team wanted to develop some strong Internet personalities distinct from the on-air
talent. The producer of TechTV.com knew me well — I had hired him into a good job,
once upon a time — and what’s more, he knew about my explorations into areas of the
Internet that everyone visits but no one talks about in polite company.
Our initial conversation went something like this:
Producer: So we’re doing this doc series about sex and technology, and we need some
web content to go with it.
Me: You need me to write a weekly sex-tech column!
Producer: Can you start Monday?
When I tell people I write about sex and technology, they often look puzzled, cock their
heads to one side, furrow their brows and say something like, “Sex and tech? You mean
like … online dating?”
C’Lick Me
Except in place of “online dating,” some people say “Internet porn.” And some say “cy-
bersex.” And some say “sex toys.” Less common are “virtual reality” and “webcams.”
Given a moment to think about it, most people come up with an example of how tech-
nology infuses their own sex lives. Some send steamy text messages throughout the day,
while others compose romantic emails that would do Cyrano de Bergerac proud. Sex
toys are coming out of the closet, thanks to their relatively new accessibility. Now ev-
eryone in the world can visit women-friendly sexuality boutiques like Good Vibrations,
Toys in Babeland or Grand Opening. (Unfortunately, not everyone can have their pur-
chases shipped to them — it depends on local laws. But we’ll get there.)
Through chat rooms, email forums, online personals, and role-playing games, we’re
finding kindred spirits, and building relationships without regard to geographical or po-
litical boundaries.
And, of course, we have an abundance of porn. Porn on the web, porn on DVD, porn
on your PDA, porn on your cell phone. Technology is enabling a barrage of sexual
content unlike anything the world has ever seen. It’s a crusader’s wet dream to have so
much to wage moral war against.
Porn Positive?
After TechTV’s demise and a three-month hiatus, I pitched Sex Drive to Wired News. I
sent the senior editor several sample columns and described my mission: to chronicle,
and to help drive the sexual revolution 2.0. We agreed to a four-week pilot, and if the
column succeeded, I would sign an ongoing contract. I was stoked.
Prior to this moment I had only written about porn peripherally. Sex Drive is about sex,
I thought, and not about porn. Only when Wired for Sex produced an episode about
online pornography did I devote any serious column space to it. I had no objection to
porn. It was just that I don’t watch much porn and I had so many other topics to cover.
But during those first four weeks at Wired News, porn dominated mainstream media
headlines. Congress had invited four prohibitionists to testify in a hearing about wheth-
er we need more studies about pornography’s effect on society and perhaps a public
awareness campaign, much like the ones warning us not to smoke or drink to excess.
Porn is heroin! the headlines proclaimed. Porn is crack! Porn compels people to commit
rape, to succumb to addiction, to become pedophiles!
My new editor all but demanded I write about this.
In researching that column (“Porn Prohibitionists Miss Point,” Wired News, 11/27/04), I
THE RISE OF THE NETPORN SOCIETY
had to examine my own feelings about porn. Was I offended? Did I fear it? Did my sexu-
al self-image change because of it? When I did view porn, what did I do with it?
Porn Is Boring
When the web first began to boom in the mid-1990s, I bought an electronic pass-key
of some kind that let me into any porn site that used the service. The idea was to keep
minors out without putting too much of a burden on subscribers — you entered your
pass-key, rather than your credit card number, to verify your age at each site. It was cool
to be able to look at as much porn as I wanted, of any flavor, without having to leave
the house.
That, and I thought it was cool to be a girl looking at porn. Not that my parents ever
mentioned porn, but somehow I learned early on that it wasn’t for girls. (Ha!)
I caught myself clicking through to a gallery, taking in the contents with a glance, and
backing out to click through to the next gallery. I didn’t need to spend much time with
the pictures to feel the titillation of porn.
That’s what gives me a hint about how it must feel to be obsessed with online porn — that
the search, as much as (or more than) the pictures, is really what turns you on. No in-
dividual picture or video can be as novel or exciting as you hope it will be, so you keep
searching and looking, looking and searching. You’re never satiated because if you just
masturbated to any particular picture or video, you’d miss out on all those other ones.
Never mind that they, and thousands like them, will still be there for you tomorrow.
I browsed through a lot of genres just because I could, but what appealed to me most
were group scenes and triple penetration. Fantasies I had not tried, but that could be
possible (although not probable) in real life. I learned that romantic, softly lit scenes of
heterosexual couples did absolutely nothing for me. Neither did naked girls. But one
woman with multiple men? Yes, please.
The novelty wore off and I did not renew my pass-key when it expired. Yet I was aware
that I had taken advantage of an opportunity not available to women until recently.
Even among the Internet generation, men far outnumbered the women working the
newsgroups for porn. It took the world wide web to bring us equal access.
I liked seeing women in sexual situations who enjoyed what they were doing, and wished
I could find more of it. I came to terms with my own preference for being submissive
in bed (although not anywhere else). I learned that being the sub meant being in con-
trol — and that being sexual meant so much more than I had heretofore experienced.
10 C’Lick Me
I rarely saw anything I would call degrading or damaging to women. I’m not saying it’s
not out there, only that I could usually avoid it. The actresses and models on the sites I
chose to patronize were paid to be there, and they knew what they were getting into.
Hell, I have a fantasy of lying across a coffee table on my back, my hands wrapped
around two different men’s cocks, my lips sealed around a third, while another man
knelt between my thighs and yet another masturbated above my belly and breasts. If an
actress in a similar scene is degraded, and represents the humiliation of all women by all
men, what did it say about me that the image made me wet and achy?
Within months, I learned that most porn is boring. It’s churned out without regard for
quality and certainly with no thought to portraying female enjoyment. But when porn
is good, it has a powerful effect on the senses. And when it’s likely to appeal to women
(which doesn’t mean it’s not explicit or “dirty”), it is often referred to as “erotica” instead.
While women like Danni Ashe and Tristan Taormino began to turn the porn world up-
side down, I looked elsewhere for sex.
For the Love of Cybersex

In my teens and early-twenties, my sexual actions did not live up to my sexual imagina-
tion. I was shy, inhibited, fearful and had almost no libido. I’d find any excuse not to
have sex, and I deliberately gained weight to keep myself “protected” from sexual be-
havior.
Like most American women, I had experienced inappropriate childhood sexual inci-
dents, although I hesitate to label them as “abuse” because on the scale of things it
truly wasn’t that bad. I could trace my negative responses to sex directly back to being
six years old when I knew something was wrong and that I had absolutely no control or
power over what was happening.
As an adult, my libido was drowned in shame and I managed to dissociate from any-
thing more involved than a kiss. Two years of therapy during college helped me find
peace and forgiveness, but I couldn’t translate that mental state into a healthy and ac-
tive sex life.
Enter cybersex.
One night, when porn wasn’t doing it for me, I decided to try something different, some-
thing more interactive: adult chat. I picked the first HTML chat room that came up in
a Yahoo search, called myself Aphrodite, and plunged in. I spent six hours in that chat
room the first night, so involved in conversation and flirting that I didn’t mind the clunky
technology. But when another member told me about Internet Relay Chat (IRC), I
Section 1: The Rise of the Netporn Society 11
dumped the HTML chat in favor of text-based mIRC (a sort of “back door” to the same
chat community). Then I went back the next day, and the next, and the next….
It was transcendent. I had written sex scenes before, but never real-time, never with a
man writing back to tell me how aroused he was, or continuing the fantasy with words
of his own. The immediate response to my words turned me on like nothing else.
And the challenge of keeping it interesting, unique and hot engaged my brain in ways
real sex had not. It’s hard to make love to a mind that’s completely dissociated from the
proceedings. But good cyber is all in the mind, even if you are also using your hands,
cucumbers or other convenient household objects for physical stimulation.
In training my brain to love sex, I found myself craving it outside the computer. I over-
came my fears about oral sex and developed a newfound appreciation for penetration. I
was in my late-twenties, I had been in my relationship for twelve years, and for the first
time I truly felt myself to be a sexual creature.
And the Tech Shall Set You Free

One of my childhood experiences involved being trapped against a wall while a neigh-
borhood boy shoved a porn magazine in my face. I clearly remember a picture of two
women extending their tongues on either side of a penis. “Just like licking an ice cream
cone!” the boy said, and I could feel a heat radiating from him that had nothing to do
with the weather.
I didn’t give much thought to the picture, even though it was my first exposure to what
adult males look like naked. (This was in the 1970s, when men in porn didn’t look like
they do now. Alas.)
But I instinctively knew I was trapped, vulnerable to whatever the big kid had in mind,
and that I had to handle the situation very carefully if I were to escape unscathed. At this
point, I didn’t have any specific knowledge of what might happen, but I did know that
it would be bad.
That incident, and others more serious, imprinted on my brain one thing: penises are
predators. It wasn’t the pictures that taught me this, it was the way I was exposed to
them. Never a secret, private perusal of the adult world; always an image thrust in my
face, and yanked away again before I had a chance to process what I was seeing.
And yet, when I hit my teens I always got along well with boys, and I could flirt with the
best. Only when it came time to put all that energy into practice did I freeze. My mental
warehouse door rolled down with the reverberant clang of metal on cement and that was
it. My mind was safe on one side, no matter what was done to my body on the other.
12 C’Lick Me
Cybersex blew that door to pieces. The computer provided two things that no amount
of real-world behavior modification could. I was safe, because no penises were in the
room with me. And I was intimate, because co-writing sex does not leave much room
for dissociation.
If you’ve done it, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, I probably can’t explain it well
enough for you to understand just how powerful it is. It’s something that has to be felt
to be believed.
Aphrodite Offline
My relationship was in trouble when I discovered cybersex, and spending all that time
on the computer did not help. We eventually parted ways. (At least he benefited from
my newfound sexual enthusiasm before we split up!) I found myself single for the first
time in my adult life.
That year is still hazy in my memory. Too much happened in a short time. I changed
jobs, moved to a new city, got a puppy. My mom was devastated about my break-up and
we could hardly talk without one of us crying.
I traveled across the country to meet one of my cybersex partners in real life and we had
earth-moving sex. I traveled up the coast to meet another one, and we had tide-chang-
ing sex. I met a guy at a country bar, and we had sex.
Suddenly, I was Aphrodite Offline. I kept condoms in my purse and a twinkle in my eye,
and I invited a few of my male friends to have sex with me. (Individually, over time, not
one big orgy.) This was not “casual sex” per se, because I don’t believe sex can ever be
casual, but I made it clear that it was sex without a romantic relationship to frame it. Sex
based on mutual affection and chemistry.
Eventually, I knew I needed to try dating formally, not just slutting around with my
friends. It’s too easy for boundaries to get blurred if you let those flings go on too long.
(Not all of my sexual education was fun.)
I realized I had never actually dated. I met my ex when I was fifteen, and was dating him
by the time I was seventeen. Here I was almost thirty and, while I had slept with more
than one person (finally!), I had never actually been on a first date. So I went after one,
the only way I knew how. I created an online personal ad and dated by the database.
Where Sex and Tech Intersect

Perhaps because my most powerful positive sexual experiences involved technology, I
have incorporated tech into my sex life on a permanent basis. Or maybe it’s just that I’m
already a geek, with technology infusing every aspect of my life, including sex.
That’s probably why my favorite sexual imagery involves tech. FuckingMachines.com

and the sci-fi/fantasy sex at Pornotopia.com consistently stoke my fire.
The intersection of sex and tech happens in the communication side of things. Sure, we
have all kinds of gadgets and doohickeys to use during intercourse, but it’s the mental
intercourse that best benefits from technology. You can have sex without any man-made
tools at all; you can’t whisper sweet nothings to a lover hundred miles away without
some sort of technology.
Mobile phones with their video cameras and hands-free headsets are essentials for any
couple who spends time apart. Webcams and instant messaging enable long-distance
sex, and show us that most sex really happens in the mind. Women often tell me they
had their first good orgasms in cyberspace.
Remote sex is getting closer to the real thing with products like the Sinulator. The Sinu-
lator is a combination of hardware and software that connects your sex toy to the Internet
for someone else to control. The control panel works with any browser, and it looks like a
game console, so if you’re in the airport, no one can tell at a glance what you’re doing.
The system even translates between a sleeve-style vibrator for men and a rabbit-pearl
vibrator for women. If he thrusts hard and fast, her toy vibrates hard and fast. If he goes
slow and gentle, hers goes slow and gentle. If he gets up and walks away, her toy goes
dormant. You can be thousands of miles away or in the same room, as long as both toys
are connected.
Through it all, communication technologies keep you in tune. Cell phones and Inter-
net telephony take the expense out of long distance, as does instant messaging and a
webcam.
The web also offers a wealth of sexual education, and I don’t just mean porn. You can
read up on sexual technique, sexual health and sexual fantasy without having to hide
a stack of books away every time your parents come to visit. Never before have we had
access to this much information with this much privacy. It may not be as sexy to think
about, but it’s one of the great benefits that technology brings to our relationships and
our sex lives.
And the anonymity conferred by a chat room handle gives you a comfortable arena in
which to ask questions, practice flirting, and even have sex in ways you have not or will
not except in a fantasy setting.
14 C’Lick Me
Am I Adult?
When Carly asked me to contribute to Naked Ambition, my first thought was: “Wait,
I’m not in the adult industry.” Then I thought: “If I’m associated with adult content, will
my column be taken less seriously?”
That’s when I realized I held prejudices about porn that I didn’t know I had. I always
said I had no problem with porn, regardless of whether I chose to bring it into my life.
Yet by not wanting to be associated with it, wasn’t I perpetuating the stereotype that Porn
Is Bad, and particularly that Porn Is Bad For Women?
“Adult” encompasses so much more than porn. And porn itself is hard to classify. I love
Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels, but each one has more sex
and less serious plot than the last. Each novel puts Anita in more situations in which she
must have sex with one or more of the several males in her adventurous life. Hamilton
writes great sex, if you like metaphysical fantasy, which I do. It’s explicit and raw and
beautiful all at once. Is it porn?
On the literary side, Jane Smiley has a beautiful lovemaking scene in her novel Horse
Heaven. I’ve given it to several friends as an example of a beautiful piece of writing,
whether about sex or anything else. It too is graphic and powerful. Is it porn? Is it adult
entertainment? Or, because it is literary, is it erotica, and is that less smutty than porn,
and therefore more respectable to be seen reading it?
Sex Drive is not explicit, neither pornographically nor erotically. But I don’t hold back
either. If I think readers need to know where I’m coming from, why I know what I know
or feel what I feel, I tell them. It’s not about exhibitionism, it’s about credibility. And I
take a “we’re all adults here” stance, even though I know not everyone who reads Wired
News is 18.
I concluded that “adult” is merely a code word for “sex,” and in that case, yes, Sex Drive
very much falls into the adult realm. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
We don’t diss food writers for writing about food, and we don’t diss fashion writers for
writing about fashion. (Well, okay, sometimes we do, but not with the same scorn re-
served for porn.) If food and clothing are two biological needs — and I would defend
clothing as a biological, not just a social, human need — why wouldn’t we afford the
same respect to sex?
I think our perception of porn and adult entertainment is built on notions about the
business and its players that may not always be true, especially now that woman have
moved up and revolutionized parts of the industry that used to belong solely to men.
The only way that perception will change is if the realities behind it change — and we
let people know about it. That’s part of what Sex Drive can do, and it’s part of what every
woman in this anthology is doing.
We’re rewriting “adult” into more mature content and business models, and I don’t
mean as in “for mature audiences only.” I mean in terms of how we approach sexual
content, whether in writing, in performing, in distributing, in experiencing, or in any
other capacity.
You Say You Want a Revolution

I don’t know why more people aren’t writing about technology and sex together in a
positive light. I know of only a handful. Annalee Newitz has a wonderful column, Tech-
sploitation, syndicated through AlterNet.org. Jonno and the Fleshbot.com team look at
porn through geek eyes. And sometimes you’ll run across an essay by a counselor talking
about how cybersex has helped clients heal sexual problems.
But when you consider just how much technology we have that centers around sex — from
Viagra to Internet-enabled sex toys to portable porn for your mobile device — it’s amaz-
ing to me that sex-tech is not a common phrase, or that women’s magazines rarely stray
beyond the safe, ubiquitous vibrator when offering advice about sexual aids.
The mainstream media seems to focus on the fear. I’ve seen so much written about In-
ternet infidelity, pedophiles using chat rooms to lure kids out to piers, CEOs, and priests
with porn on their hard drives. I don’t ignore this, nor do I pretend it’s not happening.
People do bad stuff with sex-tech.
Yet we have so many ways in which technology enhances our relationships. That’s
where I go with Sex Drive. I like to focus on the individual even if I’m writing about so-
ciety-wide implications. Here’s how I use a particular technology, or here’s how so-and-
so uses it. And here’s how you can use it too.
I like making associations that I don’t see other writers making. All my life I have been
told that I see things from an unusual angle, and I try to let that perspective guide me. I
also feel tremendous pressure to be brilliant every single time, even though I know that’s
not possible. Sometimes being informative has to be enough: informative, funny, and
insightful.
I am not an advice columnist. I just want to get people thinking, paying attention, talk-
ing about these things. My role is to make the connections, to start the conversation and
to provide a safe community where we can have that conversation.
I don’t have all the answers. But I sure as hell can raise the questions.

17
Naked Lunch:
Talking Realcore
with Sergio Messina
Mark Dery
Sergio Messina has seen the future, and it’s sticky.
Messina, 47, is the Margaret Mead of Alt.sex on the Internet. Imagine Mead as a shav-
en-headed intellectual with a drawing by Michelangelo tattooed on her back and Ital-
ian street cool to burn, and you’ve got an inkling of why this open-source anthropologist
rocked the 2005 Netporn conference in Amsterdam with his lecture — more of a dance
remix, really, with freestyle riffing and mind-curdling slides — on the online amateur
porn he calls “Realcore.”
Born in Rome (“where we hate the Catholic church with great vigor”) and now
based in Milan, Messina is a pirate radio DJ-turned-anti-copyright activist, electronica
musician, and freelance journalist (his technology column has appeared in the Italian
Rolling Stone since 2003). He’s at work on a heavily illustrated book about his investiga-
tions of amateur sexual subcultures on the net, titled Realcore: The Digital Porno Revo-
lution, which he describes as “a brief history of Realcore,” defining Realcore as “a new
brand of sexual images that appeared in the late 1990s thanks to the then-new digital
tools.” Realcore, says Messina, is pornography that’s grittier than traditional hardcore,
even, “striving to portray the reality of the (amateur) scene and the true desires of the
participants.” To him, Realcore and the community of file-swappers that has congealed
around it, is about “new and interactive sexual practices, extreme digital lifestyles, a true
18 C’Lick Me
gift economy, web personalities.” Says Messina, “The future is here…and it’s sweaty, it’s
sticky, and it swallows.”
His live multimedia presentation of his travels among Realcore enthusiasts is a heads-
pinning fusillade of unforgettable images and hilarious one-liners. Messina’s delivery has
as much in common with the staid lectures at a typical academic sexology conference as
Norwegian death metal does with American Idol. “Realcore isn’t exactly a lecture, nor is
it just a presentation of a book,” he notes. “It’s the main ‘product’: a stand-up anthropol-
ogy show. The book will be like the live album of a rock band: useful to repeat the expe-
rience, to digest the songs, but nothing like the original.”
(NOTE: I conducted the following interview with Messina via e-mail, in July 2006.
With his permission, I’ve debugged his English: correcting, compressing, and in a few
instances rephrasing his responses for clarity and concision. He has approved every edit,
and has carefully vetted this transcript for factual accuracy. MD.)
Mark Dery: Give me the historical backstory of Realcore. When and how did you first
encounter it?
Sergio Messina: I got online in early 1996 and Realcore was starting to happen. Web
porno was already huge; “amateurs” (regular looking folks) and “fetish” were two thriv-
ing genres. Back then, “fetish” meant anything from femdom to watersports.
The amateur fetish boom hit in 1997–98, as digital photography became widespread.
(The first digital camera for the consumer market that worked with a home computer via
a serial cable was the Apple QuickTake 100 camera, which came out in 1994). Also, free
Internet space became available and easy to use. Yahoo/Geocities, MSN, and so on all
tolerated porno. And, obviously, so did the Usenet newsgroups. The hierarchy of news-
groups, devoted to special interests, favored the division into subgenres. The first visit to
the complete hierarchy makes you dizzy.
MD: What weird wormhole led you into the parallel universe of Usegroups?
SM: In the 1980s, in Europe, there was a wave of amazing BDSM movies (the early
Pain and Slavesex series) that were different, and not only because of their content,
which consisted of long, unedited sequences of real BDSM practitioners, in actual dun-
geons instead of sets. Formally, these movies were very low-res, and the overall feel of
the productions was more like underground films, made by and for BDSM people. I
had seen some of these movies, which were very hard to find in Italy, and I was looking
for more. Usenet seemed like the right place to start.
MD: How did you hack your way into these Usenet subcultures? In my experience,
gaining access to porn-related newsgroups is massively time-intensive. You have to apply
Corduroy fetishist. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used with permission:
collection of Sergio Messina.
“The first 20 titles of each series, SlaveSex and Pain, were really unbelievable,” notes Mes-
sina. “About the same time there was another, more fetish-oriented series (with mostly
the same ‘actors’), called Hard Games, which featured many porn-video firsts: first scat,
first serious bestiality, first needle play. You can find some covers at dvids.com. The cov-
ers say ‘original ton deutsch,’ which suggests that the videos were made by Germans.
The production seems to be by Scala. Martina [pictured above] was the true star of the
genre. Her screen name was Martina, but her real name, apparently, is Anita Foeller
or Feller; she did some stuff under this name, too. But her name was stolen by another,
much weaker, pornstar. So if you look for her you’ll find the other…” Caveat emptor!
Mandingo fetishist. Fan of well-hung black men advertises her obsession. “Very often, re-
alcore people communicate online (or advertise themselves) by writing on their bodies and
then posting the pictures,” says Messina. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina.
Used with permission: collection of Sergio Messina.
“Tom, thank you for the shoes.” Amateur fetishist. Realcore image found online by Sergio
Messina. Used with permission: collection of Sergio Messina.
22 C’Lick Me
to the moderator for membership, keep nudging the inevitably unresponsive moderator,
and so on.
SM: First, you have to find out from your provider if you have Usenet access; it’s likely
you do. Then you need a newsreader. There are millions of freeware programs you can
use to read newsgroups — for example, Mozilla is also a newsreader (but not Firefox).
And your ISP may have a news service, with an address that goes something like news.
yourprovider.xx. Once you have this set up (very simple, much easier than setting up e-
mail), you configure it so you can see the full group list.
If your provider is good, you’ll get a very long list. These are the upper parts of news-
group hierarchies; think folders. You go to “alt” and open it; you’ll see another immense
list, the second level of the hierarchy “alt.” Then you open “binaries” (images), and inside
you select the folder “pictures.”
I’ll give you an example:
alt.
alt.binaries
alt.binaries.pictures
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.anal
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.asian
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.bodybuilder
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.bodybuilder.moderated
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.chubby
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.hardon
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.oral
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.oral.cumshots
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.piercing
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.shirt-and-tie
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.tattoos
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.underwear
There are thousands of newsgroups in the “alt” hierarchy, like alt.sex.bondage (same
folder as the one in the example, but not in the subfolder “binaries”; it’s in “sex”).
Within the hierarchy alt. binaries.pictures.erotica (which is infested with spam---
spam makes up over 50% of all Usegroup posts, but you learn to spot it), I suggest you
look into the .interracial, .transvestites, and .wives groups, just to get an overview of this
stuff and its history (many people repost older pics and collections). Also alt.personal.
bondage is sometimes quite amazing (watch out: explicit images!).
I should also say, since not many people ever visit certain newsgroups, that the chance
of stumbling across objectionable material (from violence to child porn) is very high.
One way to avoid it is to subscribe to one of the many web Usenet services (such as www.
pictureview.com) that remove child porn before displaying images from these groups.
In addition to Usenet, Yahoo hosts groups that archive amateur porn. For a while,
Yahoo was the best source of self-produced, self-published sexual imagery. Now, it’s much
harder to find it since Yahoo stopped listing such groups. They’re there, but they’re covert;
you have to know exactly where to look, and there’s more moderation.
MD: How, as an accidental anthropologist, did you penetrate the perimeter defenses of
these groups? Were they wary of outsiders insinuating themselves into their subcultures?
SM: If you see a set of images with a subject line like “comments please,” these are new
images, and often the e-mail address on the image or in the message (all images have
a space for messages, although they’re often empty) works. If you mail someone, they
always reply. Also, images often have URLs written on them; I follow those URLs. So I
didn’t find many “perimeter defenses”; after all, these are exhibitionists!
MD: Let’s return to the timeline you were unraveling. You said amateur fetishism first
hit, online, around 1997–98, enabled by digital photography and free Web hosting.
What were the cultural reverberations of the amateur fetish boom?
SM: You had the fetish people finally seeing (and making) images that weren’t available
before people like vomit fetishists, who turned out to be unexpectedly numerous.
MD: What was the effect, for amateur-fetish porn people, of suddenly discovering that
they weren’t the only ones in the sexual universe with their obsession, in some cases an
obsession so rarefied they thought they were its only examples?
SM: Let me quote from the splashpage of the very first Hiccup Lovers’ website, circa
1997 (hosted on Tripod and no longer online):
Welcome to the Hiccup Lovers’ Web Site. We are a group of both male and female lov-
ers of the hiccups. We have found one another through the power and anonymity of
the Internet. Most of us had one very basic thought when we found one another: that
we were strange or weird or that there was something very wrong with us because of our
attraction to the hiccups, either in others or in ourselves.
By finding others who share this powerful attraction, we found that we are not alone.
We are not strange or odd and there is nothing wrong with us.
By the way, the site discussed various methods for getting the hiccups. Naturally, it had
no pictures — just sound clips!
MD: Speaking of arcane obsessions, I still can’t get that hilarious, fascinating image
24 C’Lick Me
from your presentation at the Netporn conference in Amsterdam out of my mind: the
sneaker freak — the guy with his cock in a running shoe!
SM: The Web inspired people. You had regular people posting images that for vari-
ous reasons hadn’t been available, images of real people enjoying themselves in various
ways, some of them predictable (the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica newsgroups are still full
of self-portraits of people just having missionary sex), some unusual, like the sneaker
fucker.
Via the web, the white couple into well-hung blacks who hosts a gangbang in an
Austin apartment can arrange it a lot more easily, and probably got the idea from images
posted by happycouple69 (happycouple is a popular nickname) from Dover, England,
who will get very horny when they see the images posted by the Austin couple…and
so it goes.
MD: What inspired you to coin the term “Realcore”?
SM: During the 1990s, there was a strong trend toward “reality,” culminating in today’s
reality TV shows. I’m thinking of the Rodney King video, shows like Jackass and Cops.
In this genre, there are some aesthetic factors, such as low resolution, unsteady camera-
work, and unedited footage, which we gladly accept because of the so-called reality of
what we’re seeing. We wouldn’t believe the Rodney King footage if it was shot by three
cameras with adequate lighting. Only 9/11 is an exception to this rule: many people ob-
jected to the cinematic editing of news coverage of the attacks and their aftermath ex-
actly because it made things look unreal.
Now, cellphone cameras allow people to film in adult theaters, parking lots, cars,
or wherever. And, as in the case of Rodney King, you exchange good, high-definition
photography (cold, in McLuhan’s terms) for imagery that is low-res but indisputably real
(very hot!). This is why I call it Realcore. Softcore was simulated sex, hardcore went as far
as actual sex, Realcore goes beyond: it strives to portray, without too much interference,
people “actually” fulfilling their desires, often fully clothed.
Realcore is all about the reality of what you see, the truth of these images. It’s about
the desire to see someone doing something because they like to be seen. They’re filming
it because you are part of the game as well. You’re the audience. They get horny because
someone is getting horny over them. As Dante said, “Amor ch’a nullo amato, amar per-
dona” (Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving).
MD: Cultural theorists might argue that Realcore goes beyond Baudrillard’s Nostal-
gia for the Real, crossing over into a fetishization of the real — a fetishization that is
only possible in a Matrix world where the air is thick with simulacra, from the digitally
retouched celebrity faces on magazine covers to the surgically perfected flesh of the
millions who whittle themselves to fit those images; from Bush’s Last-Action-Hero pho-
to ops (Mission Accomplished!) to the Hollywood blockbuster titling and pumped-up
Sneaker fetishist. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used with permission;
collection of Sergio Messina.
Asked about the unapologetic ugliness of some Usegroup Realcore-ers, Messina counters,
“It isn’t ugliness, it’s normality---a shopping center stripped bare, you could say. The ultra-
fat or extra-ugly are us.” Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina.
Used with permission; collection of Sergio Messina.
If you’ve got it, flaunt it: according to Messina, this Realcore swinger is trolling for play-
mates by baring her assets banana breasts and a jones for nicotine. Fetching.
Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina.
Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina.
“A different tribute, very evocative,” notes Messina. “He is getting a hard-on over another
newsgroups user, and maybe he’s even online, at that very moment.” Realcore image found
online by Sergio Messina. Used with permission: collection of Sergio Messina.
Photoshopped tribute. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina.

28 C’Lick Me
theme music cable news shows slap on war-porn footage of bombs bursting in air.
If this is so, then the gross-out nature of some Realcore practices, and the stunning
ugliness of some Realcore practitioners, begins to make a certain sense: Realcore’s gross-
ness and ugliness —its irrefutable corporeality, and its frequent delight in what Bakhtin
would call the pleasures of the “lower bodily stratum” — heightens its reality, making Re-
alcore realer and therefore rarer in an age of simulations.
SM: That might be part of it. But think of these TV shows where you see police chas-
es, car accidents, rescues, bungee-jumping gone wrong, etc. For most people, there is
something very compelling in watching these shows, much more so than in watching
a reenactment. Is it because the TV channels are thick with fiction? Partly. But real-
ity TV fulfills other needs, touches some of the same strings that Realcore does. Jenna
Jameson-type industrial porno, which is becoming a bit more extreme every year, is to
Realcore what reality TV police chases are to Hollywood cop shows. It’s like Indepen-
dence Day compared to Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues. In the first movie, you know
where it’s going and you enjoy the FX; but in the second, anything, literally anything,
can happen — and does.
I agree about “the gross-out nature of some Realcore practices, and the stunning ugli-
ness of some Realcore practitioners.” Realcore stuff such as gloryhole pictures, amateur
gangbangs, and sex in adult theaters often ends up on “tasteless” sites. Scat, for example,
was extremely popular on gross-out sites like Rotten.com. That’s because Realcore is shot
in a way that proves the stuff is real: unedited equals immediate, actual, true — qualities
treasured by gross-outers and fetishists (and millions of reality-TV fans) alike. For scat fe-
tishists (and there are quite a few of them), knowing that the shit in the photos is really
shit and not chocolate (that’s another fetish!) is very important. This is why extreme-fetish
porno tends toward Realcore. The very first people to understand this were European
BDSM moviemakers in the 1980s; reality was very important for them, too.
MD: What do Realcore people themselves say about the “realness” of their auteur porn?
SM: I’ve tried to bring up the “reality” subject a few times, in e-mail exchanges, but it
seldom bounces back, conversationally. They say that they got online, and they found
these different images, and that’s how they got involved in the scene. This is a common
story: Realcore seems to be more satisfactory than porno because it isn’t passive, it’s in-
teractive.
In my lecture (which isn’t exactly a lecture; it’s more of an edutainment show, a cross
between stand-up anthropology and an X-rated Discovery Channel feature), I talk about
“tributes.” A woman posts her picture, some guy downloads it, prints it, cums on it, takes
a photo of the results — the tribute — and posts it back into the newsgroups. She gets com-
ments, requests to wear specific items — her home suddenly becomes public.
It’s a whole game, involving mostly two or more people, where the first post is only
the opening move. Once the tributes are made, the person portrayed in them collects
all these images and makes Photoshop collages that also end up online, on the person’s
website or in the newsgroups. The more tributes he or she gets, the greater the glory.
You don’t do this with just any image: tributes tend to involve portraits of faces. And
there are often specific requests for “tributes.”
What a digital, complex, multi-stage way to please each other! Real, then virtual, then
real again (and sticky), then virtual again, then sticky again…
MD: Again, very Baudrillardian: the precession of the stimulacra. Or is it sem-ula-

cra? (Forgive me, J.B.) And, in its own way, Freudian: I’m reminded of that passage in
Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny,” where he talks about the survival, in the modern psyche
of the “atavistic mental activity” that he calls “the omnipotence of thoughts” — the prim-
itive belief that subjective mental processes can affect external reality. The “tribute” has
something of the occult about it; it’s a kind of sympathetic magic — what I do to your
image, I do to you.
How has being part of the Realcore scene affected the people in it?
SM: Many people have seen a change in their sexual lives, from “spiced up” to “turned
upside down” — at least, that’s what they say. Most of them started downloading first, and
then they got cameras and started taking pictures themselves. So emulation plays a role:
they like what they see and make similar stuff. Almost all the ones I’ve contacted were
unaware of the implications — social, networking, futuristic — of what they were doing.
They didn’t have much to say about the images in terms of cultural-critical insights, but
were happy to give juicy details on the setting in which the images were taken: many
even kept online diaries (for members) — long texts, intended to accompany the images,
and serve as further evidence of their reality.
MD: You mentioned setting. I was particularly taken, during your Amsterdam lecture,
with your reading of the image of the woman proudly displaying her new trophy breasts.
As you noted, the surgical results were underwhelming, if not grisly. But you focused
(brilliantly, I thought) on the real subject of her self-portrait, namely, the sociological
subtext hidden in the backdrop she had chosen. The image was really a sort of status-
symbol porn. It was about the erotics of consumer desire — the tokens of the good life
this woman had managed to amass, proudly and prominently on display in her petit-
bourgeois livingroom. Her newly augmented breasts were just her latest acquisition.
SM: That image is very Realcore: it has no center, everything is equally relevant, from
the picture on the TV to the vases on the shelf, the carpet, etc. There’s an almost Re-
naissance quality to the image — the new breasts proudly displayed with the other house
commodities.
MD: It reminded me of a Dutch master’s portrait of a self-satisfied burgher, surrounded

by the creature comforts that proclaim his status.
30 C’Lick Me
SM: Many couples stress their respectability: “We might do gangbangs (black cocks
only, inseminate my wife), but we would never cheat; we do this within the sacred insti-
tution of marriage.” Interesting and exotic to me as an Italian, but probably more under-
standable in the US. I always love details---bookshelves, pictures, whatever.
Realcore people are seldom aware of the photographic beauty of their images; they’re
always surprised to hear me say that. In most cases, they don’t seem very aware of any-
thing else but the sexual side(s) of what they’re doing. (Personally, I find this attitude
very refreshing!)
MD: Do what extent do you — and/or they — see their autobiographical or documentary

porn as a rebellion against, or a critique of, mainstream porn, whose unblemished gloss-
iness rejects the Rabelaisian grossness and ugliness we’ve been talking about?
SM: They aren’t aware of the changes they (along with the rest of the digital revolution)
have induced in the porn industry. New mainstream porn genres have been born out of
Realcore, such as point-of-view movies. I guess it’s a bit like everything else digital: we
just do it, and analyze it later. Yet, as in the blog phenomenon, there is an awareness, and
often a pride, in differentiating what they’re doing from the mainstream media — in this
case the unblemished glossiness of magazines or corporate sex websites. They know they
are different, because they look different, and in their images they stress this difference.
They’re also aware of the different temperature of their porn: in Realcore, the camera
is inside the action; most of it is shot by one of the partners, and eye and voice contact
with the camera is almost a rule. So I would say this: they might not be “aware” of the
rebellious quality of their stuff, but the images tell a different story.
Note
Sergio Messina adds: “I presented Realcore for the first time in 2000, at the Ars Electron-
ica symposium, whose theme that year was Next Sex. As sometimes happens in digital
culture, that presentation was too far ahead of the cultural curve; the phenomenon was
blooming, but hadn’t gotten the attention of mainstream culture yet. In the succeeding
seven years, many things have happened in terms of technological change and digital
culture, and most of these changes have affected Realcore in some way. Broadband, Bit-
torrent, Web 2.0, YouTube, camphones, videoconferencing: personal media has never
been so personal. While this interview is the most comprehensive “written” text about
Realcore so far, I’d like to emphasize that I prefer to present my research as a one-hour
live infotainment show, which is what I do best: a peer-to-peer session, in the flesh,
where my body talks about bodies to other bodies. I’d like to thank the Institute of Net-
work Cultures, Marije Janssen, and Mark Dery for their interest in my work.
Sergio Messina (ragla@radiogladio.it)
31
PlayBlog:
Pornography, Performance
and Cyberspace
Nishant Shah
I intend to make two arguments about Internet pornography that might, at first glance,
seem to be already well made, made around other media forms, and made by names
more famous than mine. The first is about how pornography on the Internet needs to be
understood, not in its sexual content, but in the narrative devices and the performance
within the blogosphere. The second is about how a pathologisation of pornography in
the third world, especially in the case of India, is symptomatic of a resistance to another
larger phenomenon, something that is perhaps best left to its amiable ambiguity: glo-
balisation. By the time I reach the end of this essay, I hope to have revisited both argu-
ments and formed them differently to propose a certain understanding of interactive
cyberspaces.
I want to make a quick clarification: throughout the essay, I shall be making the dis-
tinction between the use of the words Internet and cyberspace. While the Internet refers
to the technology that binds several networks through a single access protocol, cyberspace
is borrowed from William Gibson’s definition in his novel Neuromancer. Gibson coined
the term cyberspace and defined it as something more than a network: “Cyberspace. A
consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every
nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. […] A graphical representa-
tion of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” (128).
Gibson’s notion of cyberspace was necessarily inter-active and agential. The ‘consensual
hallucination’ is a deliberate act of creation of the space and of the self. The ‘sense of who’
is firmly connected to the ‘sense of where’ within cyberspaces. This interactive nature,
and the embodiment of the self in the space are crucial in my deployment of the notion
of cyberspace. Another distinction that I would like to preserve is between pornography
on the Internet and cyberspatial pornography (or netporn as it is more popularly called).
32 C’Lick Me
I hope to formulate the two differently in the course of this essay.

I would like to suggest that categories are produced by the law through a process of
reification, where the abstract idea becomes hypostatised into an object or a thing. Por-
nography is a reified product where the notions of sex, sexuality, morality, obscenity, vul-
garity and prurience all converge to produce the ‘thing’ that we identify as pornography.
In the virtual world, the reified object is actually ephemeral in nature, thus leading to a
new definition of Internet artefacts. The law is a big player in the construction of these
categories, and the attempt by the state at policing and governing are essentially through
the medium of law. Also, an artefact comes to be recognised as ‘pornographic’ through
the interventions of the legal system.
In this essay, I hope to look at the interactions of law, culture and cyberspaces in or-
der to come to a new understanding of netporn outside of the prejudged categories of
morality, obscenity and sexuality that are generally deployed in conceiving of any notion
of the pornographic.
Penetrating Pornography
The Internet in India arrived at a time when pornography and ‘obscenity’ were already
emerging as public concerns. Here is a brief outline:
1993
• The outrage surrounding the Kamasutra condoms ads generated a lot of talk about
the nudity and sexuality they used to market their product.
• The first major controversy around ‘obscenity’ in the imagination of a ‘spectating
public’ around Subhash Ghai’s blockbuster movie Khalnayak where the heroine and
her accomplice shed the conventional roles of chastity and purity, and unabashedly cel-
ebrated their sexuality and desires in a song and dance sequence to the lyrics “Choli ke
pichey kya hai…?” (What lies behind the blouse?). Though the petition demanding a
ban for the song was rejected, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry (I&B) actually
recommended revision of the Censor Board for Film Certification (CBFC) guidelines
to curb material that was ‘obscene and vulgar.’
1994
• Anjali Kapur, advocate and model, was charged with accusations of obscenity when
she posed naked for the cover page of Fantasy magazine. Nudity was immediately trans-
lated into ‘Pornography’ without examining either the framing of the subject in the pic-
ture, or the attempts at ‘aestheticisation’ of nudity in the picture.
• The Shiv-Sena in Maharashtra announced its intentions of protecting India by “re-
pelling the attack on culture by sexual permissiveness.” Under the aegis of Pramod Na-
valkar, the then Shiv Sena Minister for Cultural Affairs, there were attempts made to
remove sex and vulgarity from Indian popular cultures through an indiscriminate con-
fiscation of books, magazines and films that contained sexually explicit material.
1996
• The infamous Tuff shoes advertisement that had a naked couple (models Madhu
Sapre and Milind Soman) locked in an embrace, wearing nothing but a snake around
their neck, saw moral panic attacks coming out in a rash.
• The Delhi High Court was flooded with petitions that demanded immediate cen-
sure and legal action against an idea that was not yet launched – An adult entertain-
ment channel called Plus 21.
• Mira Nair’s controversial movie Kamasutra – A Story of Love was released, banned,
re-released, censored and shunned by many audiences.
• Metropolitan magistrate Prem Kumar asked Doordarshan – the State owned televi-
sion network - to stop screening all material that did not have a Censor certificate (The
Pioneer, 4 July, 1996). Kumar also issued directions that authorised the police to enter
a place that screened objectionable material and seize it. A High Court decision later
stayed Kumar’s orders (The Times of India, 31 July 1996).
1997
• The Bajrang Dal — a youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) attacked an
exhibition of artist M.F. Hussain’s paintings where he had portrayed Hindu goddesses
in the nude (The Times of India, 30 January 1997). This overtly communal attack was
articulated through the ideas of ‘obscenity’ and ‘vulgarity.’
These arguments were later mapped on the Internet though they were not specific to the
Internet. The arguments are indeed an extension of the claims that were made against
satellite television, beauty contests, music videos, free economy, Hollywood movies and
the re-appearance of Coke1 in the Indian markets. They were arguments against the
outsider, who was slowly penetrating the Indian socio-economic sphere, and effecting a
new way of living; around a change which threatened to disestablish the existing order
of things, and altering the domains of life, labour and language2 in unprecedented ways;
around globalisation and the paraphernalia that it carries with it; arguments which were
eventually mapped onto the arrival of the Internet and the easy access to ‘pornographic’
material that it provided.
It is within such a quagmire of moral panic, redefinition of the notions of decency,
obscenity and culture that the Internet made its presence felt. In May 1997, a national
film magazine, Stardust, carried a morphed picture of Pooja Bhatt with the title: “Scoop
of the Month: Actresses caught nude in the net.” The first public face of the Internet was
the possibility of unmoderated, unpoliced pornographic material on the WWW — the
realm of the forbidden, the dirty and the desired.
The State’s initial reactions to the Internet were also rooted in technophobia and pa-
thology and a strong desire to police this new space. From attempts at blocking the ports
that supply pornographic material to passing laws against the under-age use of Internet
and the public consumption of Internet in cyber-cafes,3 the State has tried and failed to
monitor or thwart the proliferation of pornography on the Internet. Eventually, unable
34 C’Lick Me
to predict or control the cyberspaces, the State took a new approach towards the Internet
and its users. Computers and technology were looked upon as the panacea for curing all
the diseases that Development had spawned in India. The policing of these technologies
was taken to a new level of ‘responsible usage’ and ‘ethical consumption’ of material.
The State adopted a policy of disavowal with regards to the Internet and instead of
focusing on the grave concerns that pornography and its proliferation through the In-
ternet were posing, it decided to put the onus on the individual user4 and transferred
its attention to fights over the radio spectrum and the threats to national security that
the new technologies posited. The State has a policy of reactive resistance to Internet
pornography; taking measures as, and when, the material ‘offended’ an individual who
reports it to the machinations of the state. The new cyber laws that exist in India blame
only the consumer of pornography for his/her (generally his) access to the pornographic
material, thus creating the category of a consuming citizen who is responsible, law-abid-
ing and morally ‘chaste.’
However, the State’s circumvention of the problem has had new age mutant cy-
ber theorists dwelling on many interactive sites like P2P networks,5 IRC chat rooms,6
MMORPGs,7 MUDs,8 webcams, forums around pornographic material9 etc. in order
to understand how pornography proliferates newly in the ungoverned circuits of cyber-
space. Most of them look at the easy availability of pornographic material online and do
not set out to define or understand netporn. I would like to suggest that what needs to be
studied, in relation to Internet pornography, is not the easy availability of pornographic
material on the Internet or the sexual content of this material, but the shaping of pornog-
raphy within cyberspaces. While the Internet with its multimedia platforms serves as an
ideal space for sharing pornographic material in different formats — erotica, still images,
moving images, webcams, anime, etc. — this is not what netporn is about. I would like to
make a claim that pornography as a genre is defined differently within each of the media
it populates.10 Cinematic pornography and its conventions of framing, performance and
narrative, for instance, are very different from still image pornography in magazines like
Playboy or Penthouse. Similarly, written erotica/pornography has different structures to
operate within. To club all of these as netporn is to overlook the differences between these
pornographic products. More significantly, it draws our attention away from pornography
as it is shaped and designed by the Internet. We need to start by defining netporn as a
category of pornography that is structured within cyberspaces and inherits the character-
istics of the medium within which it is produced.
Sex in the Cyber-City

The first signs of recognition of netporn come from other spaces. Microsoft Networks
(MSN), on September 24, 2003, announced the closing of its chat rooms in certain parts
of the world — largely the third world. The concern about pornography and the Internet
was suddenly made more visible and vocal as claims were made that the chat rooms (in-
teractive Internet forums) were used for “illegal sexual acts.”11 This was a new notion of
Internet pornography, pornography not as something that was created in a place of pro-
duction and then circulated through a medium, but pornography as created in the un-
folding of the very space within which it is housed. Unlike the earlier media forms like
print and moving images — especially moving images — the creation and consumption
of pornography were the same process. This is the first take-off point to start thinking
of Internet pornography as constituted within interactions. Earlier interactive sex sites
like telephone sex or ‘talking dirty’ were often objected upon as obscene or indecent.
However, it is only with the Internet that these interactions are looked upon as prod-
ucts, as pornographic in nature. Netporn then can be located separately from the prolif-
eration of pornographic material on the Internet. It is housed in the interactions that
take place within cyberspaces across different platforms such as IRC, MUDs and blogs.
Netporn is not only a product of cyberspaces but it also becomes the visible characteris-
tic of most cyberspaces.
Traditionally, pornography was a visual spectacle of sorts where the dividing line be-
tween the performers and the audience was very clear. On the one hand were the paid
professionals who embodied the desire of the audience and performed several sexual
acts for the gratification of the audience. On the other hand was the audience who took
vicarious pleasures out of the acts being performed on screen by performers who were
the manifestation of their own desires. With netporn, the performers and the audience
are the same people. Sherry Turkle maps how users of interactive cyberspaces do it not
for something else, but for the act itself. The action becomes an end in itself and this is
a characteristic that is common across interactive cyberspaces.
There is absolutely no audience to a chat, or a blogging network outside of the partici-
pants in the blog or the chat: participation can range from active performance to passive
and innocuous lurking. The blog, though documented, is ephemeral and often lost in
the matrix, remembered only by search engines and Internet archives. These are forms
where the user becomes a performer as well as the audience. Netporn seems to encourage
such a narcissistic turn where the embodiment of our desires are us. A similar claim can
be made for webcams that allow capturing a person’s daily life and making a spectator
out of the person. Sites like DefyCategory.com have proved that the performer in front
of the webcam is as much a spectator as anybody else.
While pornography within cinema and earlier forms is so predicated upon the body,
netporn is essentially disembodied porn.12 Due to the very nature of interactive pornogra-
phy, the pornographic value of the production is not about gratification but about the pro-
jection of this gratification. To take an example; within a blog, if the user does not make
a representation of his/her orgasm — the ultimate aim of most pornographic acts — the
pornographic value of the production is completely lost. Even if the user in the physical
world does not reach an orgasm and yet makes a representation of it within the conversa-
tion, it is accepted as the culmination of the production. Disclosure on a blog would not
become pornographic in nature till it is consumed and visibly desired by the audience
that it is produced for. Self-representation (visual as well as verbal) becomes pornographic
because of the address the representation carries and the responses it elicits from the con-
sumers of the representation. The ‘pay off moment’ in netporn is not in the physical or-
36 C’Lick Me
gasm of the consumer/producer, but in the desired or projected orgasm of the user behind
the virtual handle. This disembodiment of pornography and its severe wrenching from
the notions of body is definitely a unique characteristic of cyberspatial pornography.
Once a-porn a time…

Within the blogosphere of Livejournal,13 netporn needs to be defined through the mo-
tifs of blogging and the methods of networking which are deployed in this sphere. Let
us start by defining a blog. Traditionally, in a conception that seems to think of cyber-
space as an extension of the ‘real’ world; a space of fantasy and escape, blogs have been
looked upon as an evolution of personal diaries or personal publications. It is easy to de-
fine blog as a web-publishing tool, thus spiralling an immense amount of speculation,
discussion and critique of blogs as replacing the traditional news media and bringing
out subversive narratives that shall change the world. However, this conception of blogs
comes from a techno-utopic idea and has been redundant for some time. While it is in-
deed a valid argument that the documented visibility of non-mainstream and marginal
voices leads to a certain impact on the way information and knowledge production are
treated, this is not the structural motif of blogging.14 Nor is it the defining characteristic
of a blog. Instead of looking upon blog as a medium of communication and information
dissemination, it might actually help in treating it as a cultural artefact.
A cultural artefact, to avoid any confusion, can be clearly defined as a living repository
of shared meanings produced by a community of ideas. A cultural artefact is a symbol of
communal (in the non-violent, non-religious sense of the word) belonging and posses-
sion. A cultural artefact becomes infinitely mutable and generates many self-referencing
and mutually defining narratives rather than creating a master linear narrative. Because
the cultural artefact is beyond the purview of the law and becomes a signage for the con-
struction of the Symbolic Order within a community, it carries an illegitimate authority,
which is not sanctioned by the legal systems or the State, but by the lived practices of
the people who create it.
If looked upon as cultural artefacts, blogs can reveal different ideas as to why people
blog and what are the motifs of the cyberspace medium that they inherit. I would suggest
that blogs be looked upon as structured around the idea of Hypervisualisation. Hypervi-
sualisation can be detected in the Disney and Pixar animated movies where the aesthetic
of the movie is not in the narrative structure but in the rendering visible of that which
was not previously available to a normative eye.15 It is easy to claim that cinematic por-
nography also made the usually invisible acts into viewable performances and hence is
hyper-visual in nature.16 It is necessary to understand that Hypervisualisation is not just a
method or a tool of framing but an aesthetic which helps us make sense of an artefact.
It is easy to confuse Hypervisualisation with Realism, but a close look at the tech-
niques reveals that Hypervisualisation is actually almost the reverse process of Realism.
While Realism sought to represent reality, Hypervisualisation seeks to substitute it with
a higher and more believable notion of the real. Apart from the penetrative gaze that it
offers, Hypervisualisation is essentially about unravelling and revealing that which was
hitherto unavailable to our notion of our sense of the self and the spaces we inhabit. Hy-
pervisualisation is the characteristic motif of interactive cyberspaces wherein it becomes
a trope for revealing.17 The users within interactive cyberspaces like blogs, get into a vir-
tual striptease of sorts, where they increasingly reveal parts of themselves which adds not
only to the notion of their self but also to the idea of what blogs are.
Most studies of blogging seem to concentrate on what they call ‘political’ blogs or
‘information’ blogs that have a large audience and are more visible. However, we need
to look upon blogging, not as being inspired by these promises of reportage or analyses,
but as driven by the innate desire to tell a story, and a story not of the other, but largely of
the self. A large section of the blogosphere consists of ‘personal’ blogs — biographical nar-
ratives documenting the ephemeral experience of living every day. At the cost of sound-
ing lyrical, I would suggest that blogs are an attempt to achieve immortality — to create
documents that shall outlive the user and live in the limbo of the virtual. It is the same
drive that perhaps drives an artist to use blood in her paintings on canvas, or a writer to
put his angst to paper.
The visible face of blogging — the informative blogs and the meta-blogs that anal-
yse the blogs — are actually exceptions rather than the rule. They are visible because
they are rare and it would be a mistake to look upon these blogs as representative of the
blogosphere. They need to be evaluated as subversive rather than allied to the nature of
blogging. This is the reason why I look upon the blogging community within Livejour-
nal rather than looking at the more celebrated blogs that have a large readership and are
looked upon as ‘objective’ representations. I would rather focus on blogs that tell the
story. In the methods of telling this story, and the kind of things this story telling enables,
I shall try to formulate the notion of netporn as we have conceived it so far.
A typical life cycle of a blogger on ‘ElJay’ (as it is often known amongst the more
prolific bloggers on Livejournal) is interesting.18 A ‘Noobie’ starts with tentative narra-
tive accounts of the world around him/her and initiates a commentary about their daily
life. This is what I call the foreplay of blogging. The writer in the narratives is exploring,
expanding, nudging and unfolding the physical surroundings around him/her. Through
user-pictures, personal profile pages and subscription to communities, the blogger begins
to reproduce him/herself in a specific way; trying out different names, forms and identi-
ties. As the bloggers start ‘befriending’ people and increase their audience and readership,
a strange thing happens. Instead of suddenly becoming more cautious of the self and
the things that are being revealed on the blog, the blogger increasingly sheds the layers
of pseudonymity and facades that they create in their early narratives. There is a typical
increase in talking of the self in these narratives, and one can notice a sharp shift from
the exploratory narratives to the intimate revelatory biographies that are produced in the
blogs. The disembodied protagonist self makes it easier for the blogger to strip his/her
virtual garments and exposes more of the self than ever before.19
Through moods, through user icons, through the music that they mention they are
listening to, through emoticons, through subject lines, through the filters that they set
38 C’Lick Me
around their posts, and through the metadata that they generate, the users initiate long
discussions that range from existential angst to the best kind of bread to eat with pita salad.
However, more than the content of the blog, it is the nature of conversation that they en-
courage and the element of the personal that comes out in the conversation. Flirting, talk-
ing dirty, using sexual innuendoes, putting intimate pictures of the self, or even inventing
sexually charged blogging language like ‘comment whore’ or ‘blog virgin’ are a part and
parcel of this stripping. The narratives of the self take on the overpowering temptation that
the Internet offers — of stripping the self bare without any inhibition of any kind. The blog-
ger enters an orgiastic setting where s/he is intimate with a huge range of people. These
are the people for whom the filters don’t work and the most intimate and personal feelings
and descriptions are put forward. Advice, exchanges, sharing of emotions, bonding — the
process takes many different roads. With each of the persons in this clique, the blogger
develops a sense of safety, security and intimacy that allows him/her to take things at a dif-
ferent level. It is the post third date scenario and things are going to hot up.
Directly in proportion with the conversations that people start on the blog, the blog-
ger becomes more revealing, more explanatory, more stripped of the layers that tech-
nology has imposed on him/her. And then comes a moment when the blogger finally
achieves what s/he is looking for: an acceptance of his/her narratives and the realisation
that comes from the reciprocal actions by the others who read their blogs. The content
of the blog no longer matters. The blog often dwindles into something that is mundane,
dull, everyday, regular, uniformly un-anecdotal and private. The blogger realises that it
is not so much the content of what s/he is writing as the act of writing that is important.
This moment when the blog content comes full circle and resembles the first posts, is the
moment of ‘blorgasm.’ The sense that the self has been realised and that the experience
of the moment is captured in that one representation or conversation is the pinnacle of
pleasure for a dedicated blogger.20
This is also the moment where the blogger engages in a reverse strip tease. It is at this
supreme moment of climactic joy that the blogger suddenly becomes conscious of the
publicness of his/her virtual persona. The hypervisualised self becomes the naked self
and this sense of rawness is evident in the way the blogs are written. They are no longer
for a wide audience or the large readership that the blogger has accrued. The narratives
are a form of exchange of sexual signs between the blogger and the adulterous group of
close friends that the blogger has cultivated. Often the comments take the form of an or-
giastic setting so embedded in personal views, shared meanings and language that they
make no sense to anybody else. If pornography is indeed a representation of an exchange
of sexual signs in a post-Derridian world, then blogging falls under that pattern.
It also leads to an unsettling reverse embodiment which is perhaps unique to inter-
active cyberspaces. In the first half of their blogging cycle, most users try to map their
known-imagined and aspired-for bodies in the virtual world, and look upon these bodies
as an extension of their physical presence. In the post-blorgasm world, where the blogger
suddenly becomes conscious of the disembodied body and makes a call for privatising
the public, the disembodied self comes to be mapped upon the physical body of the user;
something that needs to be hidden from the people not in the grid of the blogging com-
munity. The very act of blogging becomes pornographic in nature as it moves towards
creating a certain ethos of sexual interchange and a coming of the self in the course of
this interchange. The blog becomes a space of shared meaning where signals need to be
decoded and signs get produced out of intimately shared meanings. The blogs on ElJay,
specifically the personal blogs, take on the form of pornography as they use the porno-
graphic structure of interplay and represented pleasures of a disembodied spectator in
their unfolding.
The blog in fact becomes an illustration of netporn as I define it. Cyberspatial por-
nography needs to be tracked in interactive spaces like the blog where the self — real or
imaginary, physical or disembodied, consuming or consumed — is put on display and
reveals itself in progression, arriving at a stage where it realises itself through the conver-
sations that take place in the blog. There are thus two ways of understanding netporn:
through the grid of experience, where the user is allowed to recognise the stripped naked
self, and the realisation of the publicness of the self, where the virtual persona of the user
is mapped out on the physical body of the user. The elements of performance and par-
ticipation also need to be understood as encouraging the process of stripping the self that
happens in such environments. Pornography has been the major motif of attraction for
young and first time users of the Internet. However, the users get an intuitive understand-
ing of pornography as existing not only in the visual/written material available freely on
the Internet. They recognise the pornographic potential of cyberspace and hence most
users who come to cyberspaces looking for pornography also become producers of por-
nography in the interactive cyberspaces. More than the legislating bodies or theorists, it
is the users who have defined netporn in the interactive cyberspaces and have exploited
them to escape the panoptical view of a blinkered State apparatus.
The geeks — the power users of cyberspace, the virtual flâneur who have construct-
ed, explored, exploited and coined cybercities — had this idea of pornography and the
pleasure principle long before the cyberspace became a democratic space of GUIs and
intuitive navigation. Pr0n, geek slang for pornography of a different kind, was already in
existence to give us clues to the pornographic nature of the Internet. In Geek lingo, pr0n
has very little or nothing to do with sexuality, sexual act or nudity. It is about the pleasure
of control, of manipulation, of knowledge and of penetrating through a system, not by
breaking it but by knowing it inside out. Pr0n is in the ultimate pleasure that arises out
of interacting with and through a system towards a physical and virtual climax. The sub-
versive element of Pr0n is not in defeating the system but in embracing it, immersing
in it and in deploying it beyond the initial conceptions of the system. The pornographic
in blogging on Livejournal is not about getting heard but about practicing pornography
without being detected by the machinations of the state.
While the incidents like MSN’s closing of its chat rooms and Yahoo’s currently with-
drawn ‘personal room’ service are already hinting at their recognition of the pornographic
nature of such platforms, the state remains impervious to such an understanding of net-
porn and clambers in the dark to arrive upon a policing of pornography on the Internet.
40 C’Lick Me
The IT law passed as late as 2000 understands Internet pornography in the old fashioned
grids of production, circulation, distribution and consumption.21
The law is incapable of dealing with the ephemeral quality of netporn and the pos-
sibility that pornography is not always ‘prurient or lascivious.’ Hence it is unable to deal
with either the digital sexual material that circulates so easily, or the intensely subversive
pornographic nature of interactive surfing that the users indulge in on the cyberspace.
This policing of cyberspace from an external body is an indication of the failure of the
legal apparatus to understand, identify or account for the object under consideration — in
our case, Internet pornography. The authority of policing has always been the privilege
of the State and also one of the activities through which the State validates its existence.
However, this authority is now displaced to governing post-geographical authorities that
rule in the realm of the Internet. The pathologisation of the cyberspace by the very bodies
that create and govern cyberspaces needs to be taken into account. The decision to police
and to promote certain interactive cyberspaces is not just an economic decision but also a
recognition of these spaces as embedded in cybercultural practices of a certain kind.
The last stroke

I had set out in this paper to explore the possibility of understanding netporn as a par-
ticular brand of pornography that is shaped exclusively within interactive cyberspaces.
It was my intention to recognise netporn not as something embedded in sexual repre-
sentations, but as something formed by the sphere of interaction and networking that
emerges out of the practice of blogging. The need to recognise netporn as constituted in
these spaces was to look at the possibilities of resistance and subversion without getting
caught in the debates of obscenity and morality that usually surround any discussions of
pornography. It is also interesting to note that netporn, thus understood, can be recog-
nised as paraphernalia of the all-inclusive globalisation. It also lets us recognise that the
resistance that the Internet meets in the names of obscenity and morality are actually
misplaced and are geared towards protesting against the approach of globalisation in
the third world. As a last remark, such an understanding of netporn gives the notions
of subversion or dissent a new idea, allowing us to bypass the often all-containing deci-
sions of the Indian nation state where pornography, and its production, consumption
or possession, is a crime. It also hints at the shifting paradigms of authority and pow-
er — as bodies more powerful and pervasive than the geographically restricted nation
state emerge — and become the new policing and governing bodies in a world defined,
understood and consumed through the deployment of cyberspatial technologies.
Notes
1 The story of Coke in India is fascinating. Coca-cola, the world’s largest cola drink,
was available in India till the 1960s and was emblematic of a certain Western mo-
dernity and urbanism in Indian cinema and art. However, following the closed
market policy, Coca-cola disappeared from the Indian markets, only to make a reap-
pearance after almost thirty years when the Indian economy adopted the free mar-
ket structure. Coke once again became the brand that skipped a generation to arrive
as the new sign of modernity and progress. The reappearance of Coke in the Indian
markets was a sign of a new way of living and critiques of the State’s economic poli-
cies and globalisation have often revolved around this particular phenomenon.
2 Michel Foucault in his The Order of Things talks about a paradigm shift visible in
the domains of life, labour and language. Globalisation has changed the way we
live, we work, we think of property and we create narratives of our self. It is one of
the most visible paradigm shifts in the last century.
3 In many Indian states, the cybercafés still demand a photo identity proof of age
before allowing the users to access the net. In a recent discussion in the Indian par-
liament about the access to pornography in public spaces, the concerned minister
declared that they are encouraging cybercafés to do away with private cubicles and
display panels, thus not giving privacy to the users.
4 In the recent spate of MMS scandals that have been doing the run of cellphone
users in India, the case of the DPS MMS is particularly interesting. The infamous
DPS MMS is a short video clip shot by a male student at the Delhi Public School,
New Delhi, engaging in sexual acts with a fellow female student. The clip spread
like a contagion among the cellphone users around the nation and hit headlines.
The court’s decision over the case rules that anybody found in possession of this or
similar clips on their cellphones or personal computers can face up to six months
of imprisonment and/or a fine of ten thousand rupees. Here again is an example of
the law’s inability to understand a cultural form so that the producers of the mate-
rial run free, but the consumer of the material is found guilty. This is a definite
example of disavowal on the part of the state, where instead of policing technology,
it polices the consumption of technological forms.
5 P2P or Peer-to-Peer networking has been one of the most used ways of sharing sexu-
al content on the Internet. Instead of uploading material on a home page on some
server, the P2P allows the users to share files and folders unsupervised on the hard
drive of their computers and transfer them across Internet connections. P2P was
also the biggest forerunner in encouraging piracy of media on the Internet.
6 Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has been one of the most prolific Internet activities and
has come to stand in for the popular Internet idea of ‘forever connected.’ Elizabeth
Reid’s account of IRC in her Master’s thesis has been one of the more influential
texts on the experiences and economy of IRC.
7 One of the biggest excitement in the gaming world currently is about massive mul-
tiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) which allow the users to work in an
42 C’Lick Me
evolving virtual world at the same time over the Internet. More information about
the MMORPG is available at http://archive.gamespy.com/amdmmog/week1/.
8 Multiple User Dungeons or Multiple User Domains are text-based virtual reality
platforms where players interact through massive role-playing and characterisation,
investing a lot of time and text in creating the contexts and environments for their
interactions. One of the most celebrated MUDs, Lambdamoo, has been made pop-
ular by Julian Dibbell’s essay “How a rape happened in cyberspace.” More informa-
tion on Lambdamoo is available at http://www.lambdamoo.info.
9 Very few studies of pornography on the Internet have actually focused on the physi-
cal moorings of cyberspace. Jane Gaines is a rarity who, in her productive article
“Machines that Make the Body Do Things,” looks upon the arrival of electric vibra-
tors (more popularly known on the net as dildos) as an indicator of the relocation
of the female clitoris and its gratification; something that heterosexual porn had
blind-sighted in order to focus on the ‘pay off moment’ — the sperm of the male
orgasm spattered all over the body of the female performer. This was perhaps one
of the first indicators of how netporn is not located in the material available on the
net, but in the way the users deploy the technology in their interactions with each
other. These interactions are threefold: human to human, human to machine, and
machine to human.
10 In his study of the infant Jesus iconography Childhood, Chris Jenks explores the
objectification of the child for a particular gaze; religious, in this instance, as the
beginnings of child pornography and the constitution of the child as an object of
pornographic interest. Jenks tries to make a claim that pornography is not consti-
tuted within the content but in the framing of the subject. With film studies and
especially ‘porn studies,’ this is an argument that has often been made. Ashish Ra-
jadhyaksha, in his forthcoming book, talks of Realism in Indian cinema as porno-
graphic in nature and looks at the world-renowned films of Satyajit Ray and Dada
Saheb Phalke to make a case for cinematic pornography.
11 It is hardly surprising that the only pornography that is objectionable in the
USA — child pornography — is presented as the reason for MSN and Yahoo’s dis-
continuation of their chat rooms.
12 Take for instance, the blog of a ‘desperate housewife’ at http://tademy.blogspot.
com/ where the blogger writes about the most intimate parts of her life in a very
graphic nature, often bordering on the pornographic.
13 http://www.livejournal.com is now one of the biggest free blogging services avail-
able based on open source software. One of the biggest advantages of using Live-
journal for a sample is the unique community features that Livejournal offers by
which people of different tastes, preferences and geographical locations can come
together to network and interact.
14 Anna Nataro, in her forthcoming book provisionally titled Introduction to the
Blogosphere, makes a strong argument for blogging as a Habermasian public
sphere. However, such an argument is valid only for blogs that are obviously con-
structed for a notion of public participation. It would be misleading to say that

blogs are primarily public in the Habermasian sense of the word.
15 This setting of the Hypervisual against the Realist is an interesting juxtaposition. It
allows us to look at Hypervisualisation as the overthrow of the cinematic ethos of
Realism and the introduction of a new way of looking at the world around us.
16 Linda Williams, in her work Hard Core, provides an illuminating account of how
the pathologisation and clinical framework of approaching pornography is actually
a way of controlling and shaping female desire and sexuality. Williams is bent on
talking of pornography as that which renders the invisible visible, thus relocating
the invisible in the domain of consumables and approachable. Though Williams
doesn’t use the term Hypervisualisation, it is on this simple understanding of ‘make
it visible’ that she bases her argument.
17 Within blogging, especially within the blogosphere of Livejournal, Hypervisuali-
sation can be observed and studied in the interactive memetic behaviour across
the blogs and user groups. Memes, generally identified as a bundle of data that
gets transferred from one agent on to another, come in many forms and a liberal
definition of memes would identify computer viruses, computer generated quiz-
zes and results, chain letters and emails as memetic behaviour. My focus is more
on memes with two active agents participating in the transfer. Also, Livejournal,
because of its interactive space encourages memetic behaviour and thus offers a
strong connection between narrativisation and memeisation.
18 A power blogger for more than six years now, Min Jung (MJ) at www.Minjungkim.
com gives a hilarious, although a little stereotypical idea of a blogger’s life cycle
on his personal blog. However, my model moves away from his a little and is more
typical of a user on ElJay.
19 In an extremely provocative article: “Bloggers need not apply,” available at www.
chronicle.com, Ivan Terrible unwittingly notices the same trope of hypervisualising
the self that is visible amongst the bloggers. In fact, Ivan goes ahead to warn prospec-
tive and current bloggers to make the same mistake of revealing too much about
themselves. Ivan’s warnings have a ‘practical’ tone to them, but he too recognises the
discomfort that comes from activities like blogging or other interactive cyberspaces.
20 Paul Willemen, in his aspirations for a Pornoscape, draws a close link between the
knowledge and the experience of sexuality. Drawing from the parable of the Origi-
nal Sin and tracing it to the claims of authenticity that are produced through ex-
perience of sexuality, Willemen brings to the fore the power equations that revolve
around the construction of sexuality and the pathologisation of it through an unin-
formed critique of pornography. The blogger, in the blorgasmic moment bridges
the gap between experience and knowledge. The first cycle of blogging is experien-
tial, and the knowledge of that experience feeds the second part of the cycle.
21 “Whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published in the electronic form
any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is
such as to tend of deprave or corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all
44 C’Lick Me
relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it,
shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either description or a
term which may extend to five years and with fine which may extend to one lakh ru-
pees and in the event of a second or a subsequent conviction with imprisonment of
either description of a term which may extent to 10 years and also with fine which
may extend to 2 lakh rupees. “ -- Section 67 of the IT Act (New Delhi, 2000).
References
Dibbell, J. (1994) “A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster
Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society,” in The Vil-
lage Voice, available at http://www.ludd.luth.se/mud/aber/articles/village_voice.html.
Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New
York, Pantheon.
Gaines, J. (2003) “Machines that Make the Body Do Things,” in More Dirty Looks:
Gender, Pornography and Power, ed. P.C. Gibson, London, BFI, pp 176-89.
Ghai, S. (Director), Khalnayak, Mukta Arts Productions, 1996.
Gibson, W. (1984) Neuromancer, New York: Ace Books.
Jenks, C. (1996) Childhood, London, Routledge.
Nair, M. (1996) (Director), Kamasutra – A Story of Love, Mira Nair and Lydia Dean
Pilcher Producers.
Nataro, A. Introduction to the Blogosphere, forthcoming.
Rajadhyaksha, A. (2004) work in progress presented at CSCS, Bangalore on 12-09-04.
Reid, E. (1994) Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities, Master’s thesis,

Melbourne, University of Melbourne.
Turkle, S. (1996) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, London: Wei-
denfield and Nicolson.
Williams, L. (1989) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the visible’, Berke-
ley, University of California Press.
Willemen, P. (2003) “For a Pornoscape” in More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography

and Power, ed. P.C. Gibson, London: BFI, pp 9-27.
45
Sex on the Open Market:

Sex Workers Harness
the Power of the Internet
Audacia Ray
Sex work may be the world’s oldest profession, but the word “profession” until recently,
has been only vaguely applicable to this line of work. It’s perhaps more accurate (though
less snappy) to say that sex workers1 are the world’s oldest unregulated working popula-
tion. But for a profession that can stake such a historical claim, the industry is extremely
adaptable — and workers have been quick to pursue opportunities provided by the In-
ternet as they arose and continue to change, including but not limited to online porn.
Though the porn performers I wrote about in the last chapter, as well as the cam girls in
the first chapter, certainly qualify as sex workers, the Internet provides women whose sex
work is conducted in person, especially escorts, with new opportunities for advertising,
screening clients, and building community with one another.
Because of the shame of societal disapproval and the logistics around the legal reper-
cussions inherent in this line of work, advertising, safety, and access to community are
immense challenges to people who work in the sex industry. Over the last dozen or so
years, the Internet has allowed for a massive shift as far as access goes, and the sex industry
has therefore become more accessible to would-be workers and clients. The sex industry
has also simultaneously become more private and more exposed, more professional and
more of an identifiable culture. The culture of shame around the industry is very much
alive in some respects; however, for many women, shame is being chased out as more and
more current and former sex workers out themselves in the media beyond the Internet.
The most obvious example of this outing is in the ways porn stars are obsessed over
by mainstream media. Sex worker chic is spreading like wildfire. In certain ways, this is
nothing new: Xaviera Hollander, internationally known as “the happy hooker” after her
46 C’Lick Me
1972 book by the same name, became a celebrity and symbol of free love in the 1970s.
Since then, porn stars, strippers, and high-class call girls have leapt into the mainstream
spotlight through sex scandals and tell-all memoirs. For the sex workers themselves, this
popularity is not dissimilar to the shiny red apple with a razor lodged inside: As trendy
and appealing as sex work can seem to be, the profession is still rife with stigma and many
inherent risks. The possibilities of the Internet for sex workers lead to a kind of choose-
your-own-adventure negotiation with notoriety and secrecy, where a sex worker can easily
become something of a celebrity both within her own community and outside of it if she
puts in the effort. Though there are many different kinds of sex workers who use the Inter-
net, including escorts, fetish workers, dommes, and strippers who use online forums for
support, the bulk of this chapter focuses on middle-class escorts, the most rapidly grow-
ing and visible part of the industry mainly because of the ways the Internet has changed
that particular aspect of sex work.
Print is Dead
When I was doing public relations for a porn company, people were always surprised
that such a job existed. Sure, sex sells other stuff, but, they wondered, doesn’t sex just
sell itself? The truth is that a lot of deep marketing-thought goes into the sex indus-
try, whether the entity being sold is an independent escort’s companionship or couples’
porn. However, it’s true that marketing becomes tricky when there’s no physical prod-
uct, or when the service that’s being provided isn’t necessarily legal. Mainstream ad
agencies deal with versions of this problem all the time as they market brands and life-
styles, but sex workers tangle with it in a different way, because the thing on the market
block is them. Advertising has always been the simplest for street workers, because what
you see is what you get—with maybe a few minor and inevitable variations. However,
for women who work in dungeons, brothels, and private apartments, or outcalls to ho-
tels, advertising is a very precise art form requiring that they reach a perfect balance
between adequately representing themselves so that the client is not disappointed and
construing themselves in a way that attracts the kinds of clients they want to see.
For women who work independently, the Internet has opened up a vast new world of
opportunity in which different marketing styles can be tried out cheaply and easily—and
changed immediately if they fail. It’s hardly an overstatement to say that the Internet has
transformed the sex industry: the ways businesses are run, the stigmas attached to being
on either side of the transaction, the visibility of the industry, and the information avail-
able about sex workers who market their services. Many sex workers who worked in the
industry before the Internet jumped right on board with Internet advertising as soon as
they got a glimmer of the opportunities the web offered.
The Old Guard Goes High Tech

The Internet has also inspired a new generation of sex workers to find their places in the
industry and develop opportunities that may not have presented themselves without the
Internet. In 1989, Veronica Monet started working as an escort in Berkeley, California.
She advertised in the Spectator, a major weekly adult tabloid at that time. The paper
was essentially a vehicle for sex workers’ ads, which were its major source of capital.
Each ad, which typically took up a sixteenth of a page, consisted of a few lines of text,
a sort of abstract photo that didn’t show the woman’s face, and a phone number. For
Monet and other independent sex workers of her era, small ads in the Spectator and he
information provided, Monet received many more phone calls than she did clients. Of-
tentimes the potential client would reveal what kind of woman he was looking for and it
wouldn’t be a fit. Agencies weren’t always helpful, and they were renowned for the “bait
and switch,” in which a photograph or description of one woman is provided and then
someone not matching that description at all appears for the job. Certainly the thrill of
the unknown was part of the appeal for some clients, though for others the roadblocks to
getting exactly what they wanted were numerous.
Monet used the Spectator exclusively for the first two years of her career, until a
technologically savvy client of hers gave her the heads-up about Bulletin Board Systems
(BBSes), an early, nonpublic form of the Internet. After discovering the BBS, Monet con-
tinued to use print ads, but she began to give potential clients a password so they could log
on to her little corner of the system. The men were able to check out pictures that gave
them a much better sense of her than the newspaper ads. Monet made the bold choice
to show her face in the photographs she posted online, something almost unheard of at
the time. By 1992, Monet was fully exploring the options that the burgeoning Internet
technology had to offer.
Likewise, Catherine La Croix, a sex worker who had started in the business as a
BDSM phone sex operator in the 1980s, got her start on the BBS in the mid-1990s.
She and a business partner (also a sex worker) built the first major woman-owned BBS,
Two Babes Online, in 1995. They hosted sixty-four incoming lines and held forums on
which people were able to discuss sex. Two Babes Online quickly became a go-to place
for people of all stripes to explore their sexuality. But this site became more than just its
message boards; it was an early incarnation of a porn site. The images made available on
the BBS were posted in many different formats, which meant that a porn consumer had
to make some effort to get to know the technology of the system so he or she could sample
the wares in order to get the instant gratification that these sites had the potential to pro-
vide. Slow-paced and roundabout not-so-instant gratification aside, the BBS proved to La
Croix and her partner that there was money to be made from sex on the Internet.
After experiencing the sharp rise in popularity of Two Babes Online, La Croix began
to explore the options for advertising offline services on the Internet. She had since be-
come an escort, and decided that the Internet seemed like a good way to pursue clients.
Located in Seattle, she was in close proximity to Microsoft. Her foresight that, in her
words, “Geeks need sex, too, or even more so” led to a thriving business. Like Veronica
Monet, she made the choice to show her face in the photographs she posted on her first
website. Though she hadn’t shown her face in print advertisements before that point,
La Croix had done an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, so she wasn’t afraid of
the level of exposure that might result from her postings. She saw showing her face as an
48 C’Lick Me
important tool in reaching the kinds of clients she wanted to see. Today, face shots are
commonplace among sex workers who advertise online. La Croix notes that the Internet
fools people — both sex workers and clients alike — into thinking they’re anonymous. In
fact, she says, it’s quite the opposite. It’s possible for anyone posting photos online to be
recognized out in public, especially when posting face shots, or pictures with other iden-
tifying details, and the IP (Internet Protocol) address one posts from is recorded on each
website a person visits and viewable if the website’s owner keeps track of visitor statistics.
So with a little bit of know-how, anyone’s Internet use can be traced.
For both Monet and La Croix, the Internet opened up a new, untapped market of
tech-immersed, middle- to upper- class men who were spending tons of time in front of
their computers and who were looking for ways to interact with women in a structured
and limited way because they claimed to have no time for a full-blown relationship.
These men began to form the backbone of the online advertisement-driven sex industry.
They had money and time to burn on the Internet, which made them ideal guinea pigs
for searching and contacting sex workers online. Sex online — something that was previ-
ously only accessible and appealing to people who understood the inner technical work-
ings of the Internet — has exploded since the early 1990s, and the Internet has become
more widely available and user-friendly.
New York-based dominatrix Jo had been a sex worker before she moved to New York
in 1997 but hadn’t capitalized on the Internet until she started using the message boards
at fetish and BDSM website Max Fisch Domina Guide. Jo launched her website in 1999,
a bit later than Monet and La Croix. She doesn’t think that the clients she has obtained
through the Internet are any different than the clients she got through other forms of ad-
vertising. This difference of opinion probably stems from a range of factors pertaining to
the different experiences of someone coming to the industry a bit later in the game. When
Monet and La Croix first began to experiment with the BBS and online advertising in the
early 1990s, Internet access was not as widespread as it would be just a few years later. At
that time, the notion of meeting people online was seen as dangerous and sketchy, even
though most users were likely to be introverted computer programmers who are more
harmless than the average Internet user today. By the late 1990s, America On Line had
begun to dominate the Internet and promote a more user-friendly platform, which acted
as an invitation for average Americans to get online in droves.
Just as trends in clientele have changed over the years, there have been changes in
trends for workers themselves. The change witnessed in the industry was perhaps most
jarring for women like Denzi, who became a sex worker in the late 1970s, got out of the
industry, and then returned to escorting in the early 2000s and started to use the Internet
to advertise. Whereas Monet, La Croix, and Jo all made relatively smooth transitions from
print to online advertising, Denzi had a steep learning curve to deal with after having
been away from the industry for so many years. More than two decades ago, Denzi started
working at a massage parlor in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of nineteen, staying there until
she met a pimp who took her to Phoenix and later to Los Angeles, where she became a
streetwalker. After a few years, she escaped her pimp and made her way back to Arizona
to finish school. “After getting married, divorced, having kids, and a long career in the
paralegal field, I decided to return to prostitution via online escorting,” she says. Now
forty-eight, Denzi has remade her sex worker persona without a trace of the street worker
aesthetic, and notes, “I think I would have definitely started back in sex work without the
Internet, but my experience would be far less prosperous without it, I imagine.” Denzi,
whose tagline on her website, Denzi4u, is “Beyond the Ordinary Erotic Encounter,” po-
sitions herself as an elite companion with session options that include a sensual Japanese
tea ceremony. Like many women who have their own sites, Denzi appeals to a middle-
class clientele of gentleman who want to be pampered.
Class and a New Generation of Workers

One of the most powerful changes the Internet has brought to the sex industry is that it’s
created a vast and visible middle class of sex workers who cater to middle-class men. Pri-
or to the advent of the Internet, the media tended to portray an extreme when it came
to sex workers: The women tended to be either high-class escorts who made upward of
$20,000 for a weekend excursion to an exotic locale with a high-status businessman,
or downtrodden, drug-addicted streetwalkers who were usually women of color. The
number of sex workers who fell somewhere in between those two extremes is difficult
to quantify, but there’s no question that the widespread infiltration of the Internet into
the majority of people’s homes has resulted in an increase in the number of women who
make up that middle ground. It’s populated by women who may be full-time, long-term
sex workers, as well as others, such as college students who are temporarily doing sex
work or women who do sex work casually to supplement the income they make from
full-time jobs in other fields. The scope of the Internet does seem vast, but the majority
of the world’s sex workers do not use the Internet to do their work.
Documented in blogs and on message boards, middle-class sex workers tell their sto-
ries directly and indirectly, detailing lives of middle-class comfort that include homes,
families, and friends—just like people in any other line of work. Online advertising ven-
ues, message boards, and communities have, in many respects, standardized the industry
and brought it to a newly professional level. Without too much effort, a potential client
or sex worker can find out what the going rate is for an hour-long session in his or her re-
gion; sex workers who charge much higher or lower tend to be criticized by others in the
area. Likewise, there are standards for behavior and modes of dress for both online and
offline experiences that are increasingly being enforced on message boards and through
review sites.
The Internet makes dabbling in the sex industry as an independent worker much
easier in most respects, but it’s debatable whether the Internet has brought more women
into the industry than would otherwise be in it. The Internet makes it possible for the
curious woman to explore her working options without having to make the scary phone
call to an agency, or go to an interview at a brothel, and she doesn’t need to have any
direct connection to the industry to try it on for size. Because it is a high-stress, stigma-
tized, and sometimes illegal business, the turnover among sex workers is immense. Most
50 C’Lick Me
women don’t stay in the industry for more than a year or so at a time. Though they may
drift in and out of the industry over the years, it’s unusual to find a sex worker who is de-
voted to sex work as a career.
Catherine La Croix comments, “The web has unfortunately made more women
think they can do this because they think it’s easy . . . A lot of women don’t contemplate
the ramifications of this job because of the Internet. What lots of them don’t understand
is that this is a business, first and foremost.” Though sex workers’ websites are of course
meant to attract clients, they can also have the effect of seducing wannabe workers into
the industry under the pretense that the work is sexy, fun, and easy. Speaking about the
deceptions offered up by Internet advertising to young dommes, Jo says, “It’s easy for
them to get the wrong impression because of the way websites are put together. Many
women have lists on their sites of things that they will not do because of legal restrictions,
but the reality is that everyone in the business does these things once they get to know a
client a bit better.”
Although interest in sex work has certainly increased since the advent of the Internet,
and women who may not have wanted or been able to work independently without an
agency or pimp can do so now, the work itself remains the thing that ultimately discour-
ages women from getting into the industry. The Internet has, in Veronica Monet’s words,
created a class of sex workers with a “pseudocelebrity status,” but it has not changed the
essential nature of what sex workers do—exchange erotic labor for a living. La Croix is
direct: “To put it bluntly, you need much more than tits and ass; it’s whether or not you
have the mind for it. You have to know who you are, and the way that you see yourself is
all-important,” she says.
Recognizing the difficulties of sex work is often challenging when women are faced
with the ease of technology and increasing availability of both online and offline guides
to the ins and outs of the sex industry, as well as intricate support and networking sys-
tems. For young women flirting with the idea of entering the industry, the options are
both daunting and comforting, as there is no longer the need to do sex work in a void,
without the support and understanding or at least email correspondence of fellow work-
ers. Whether a woman ultimately chooses to get into the industry or not, there are many
resources available to her online, not the least of which are advertisements posted by
other sex workers. Over the last few years, online advertising for sex workers has become
a serious business with seemingly limitless options.
Pitching the Persona

There is a massive number of websites that assist sex workers in advertising to their po-
tential clients. Two of the biggest national sites are Craigslist, which is free for sex work-
ers to post and clients to browse, and Eros Guide, which has a monthly fee for sex
workers to place ads and is free for clients to browse. There are many other sites that
cater to particular tastes or are similar to these sites with minor variations in design and
searchability. While sex workers and clients tend to have their preferred sites, they often
use several different ones at the same time, though how widely they cast their net often
depends on the associated costs for membership; some sites charge sex workers to post
ads, while others charge clients to search them. Craigslist and Eros Guide have each
been online for more than a decade, so their national standing is well established. New-
er sites that host nationwide ads quickly learn that it is more profitable to cater to select
cities and have many ads for one city rather than few ads for each of many cities.
Craigslist’s Erotic Services is one of the many pages on the free, public, reader-mod-
erated board, which, like all Craigslist pages, is organized by city. Posters can create text
posts of any length, and as of a few years ago, they can also add pictures. Craigslist is a
bit of a clusterfuck, though it’s searchable by whatever keyword you can dream up. The
posts go up on a first-come, first-served basis, and they cycle off the front page of the fo-
rum as new ads are posted. The front page features the one hundred most recent posts,
which in major cities like New York and San Francisco cycle off at an alarming rate—as
quickly as a half an hour after posting. Craigslist’s Erotic Services postings are highly
sensitive to things like weather, holidays, and time of day, with big spurts of postings near
lunchtime and toward the end of the workday. Some of the more amusing posts go up
late at night to appeal to high and horny guys trolling the Internet and making less-than-
stellar choices about where and how to spend their money (well, maybe stellar for the
girls they give their money to). Though the search feature helps make things more exact,
Erotic Services doesn’t have categories; posters include keywords that they know people
will search for, including online escort slang so that they can attract the kind of clients
they are most interested in.
Because of the fact that the Erotic Services forum is free to use and doesn’t require
any kind of registration to post or send messages, as well as the fact that it’s attached to
a larger website that doesn’t have erotic implications (unless you think finding an apart-
ment or trading your bicycle for a TV is sexy), it tends to attract a high number of men
who have never hired a sex worker before and have no idea how to go about it, as well
as men who are looking for a cheap, fast fuck, and men who don’t understand why they
have to pay for sexual services. Craigslist is considered by many sex workers to be the bot-
tom of the barrel because of the type of clientele it attracts, but many workers who use
other advertising venues as their primary means of getting new clients still occasionally
advertise on Craigslist if they have a gap in their schedule to fill.
Craigslist is also popular among women who don’t do sex work as their primary
source of income and who don’t want to spend the money on a monthly ad that will at-
tract more clients than they are willing or able to see. They use Craigslist to post an ad and
book a session as their time allows and when their income could use the padding. Chariz,
a lesbian in her midtwenties who spent some time making money by wrestling men she
connected with on Craigslist in Portland, Oregon, stumbled across the world of erotic
wrestling by way of Google. Her work in freelance construction sent her onto the job
boards on Craigslist, and after she pursued wrestling as a casual erotic interest, a friend
convinced her to try moving her wrestling ad from the Casual Encounters section to
Erotic Services. About her choice to do this work, Chariz says, “I probably wouldn’t have
started wrestling men for money without Craigslist. It was part necessity, but not com-
52 C’Lick Me
pletely. I’ve always been able to get other jobs, so if it hadn’t been as convenient, I don’t
think I would have put the time into getting clients.” Although Chariz developed a few
regular clients who she wrestled once or twice a month, wrestling wasn’t her main source
of income, and her use of Craigslist to get clients remained fairly casual and dependent
on her schedule, as well as her financial needs while she was a college student.
Workers like Chariz are the coveted “non-pro” workers. They’re typically young, col-
lege-age women (or women who pose as such) who claim to love sex or whatever fetish
they’re catering to. They often post ads that say something to the effect of “I’m doing this
for the extra pocket money,” to buy books for school or new clothes or other nonessen-
tial items. Full-time professionals are often criticized on Craigslist, despite the fact that,
technically, a person who accepts money for sexual favors is a pro. The assumed value of
a nonpro is that she’s not doing the work primarily for the money, but rather because it’s
fun and the money is a delightful side benefit. On Craigslist, the message boards and the
advertising boards are one and the same, so clients and workers alike declare their dis-
appointment with one another right alongside the ads highlighting the very services the
men are seeking out. Whenever clients describe a woman on the board as a pro, they’re
almost always saying so with a sense of disappointment, because they seem to be perpetu-
ally in search of slutty college students who may ultimately agree to a no-strings-attached,
no-fees-involved kind of arrangement.
Professionals, however they position themselves, are the name of the game on Eros
Guide, which has online advertising branches in more than thirty US cities, as well sev-
eral in Canada and the United Kingdom. Lily, a thirty-two-year-old from Manhattan,
started stripping at twenty-two and later became an escort, placing an ad on Eros Guide
in 2001 that was the mainstay of her marketing strategy. Even though escorting was her
main form of income, Lily found it worthwhile to advertise herself as a non-pro college
student, which was a marketing angle that resulted in her never having to launch a web-
site of her own. She thought a website would make her appear to be the professional she
actually was, and that it would destroy her carefully constructed college-girl image. An
added bonus was that she could avoid the costs and headache associated with creating and
maintaining a website. Lily found that the wording of her ad, as well as the photographs
she used, made a big difference in terms of the types of clients she could get: Photos shot
from a low angle attracted submissive men, while photos featuring her in conservative
outfits baring little skin attracted vanilla clients who were easy to get along with.
Advertisements on Eros Guide are broken down by type of session: escorts, mas-
sage, dancers, BDSM/fetish, tv/ts/shemale, men, and tantra; they also have searchable
subcategories for hair color, Asian, ebony, Latina, porn stars, boob size, incall/outcall.
Though the ad offerings are standard city to city—two hundred words, a phone number,
a weblink, and three photographs (all of which are updatable at no extra cost whenever
a worker supplies new content)—the ad rates vary by city depending on what the market
will bear: In Denver an ad costs $60 a month, while in New York it costs $175.
Eros Guide ads target a middle-class market of men who have Internet access and
money to burn. They’re for men who prefer an online shopping experience of casual
browsing and research before they make a decision. The interconnected networks of
Eros Guides in each city make the website ideal for traveling businessmen, because
even though the sex workers are different in each city, the website navigation is the same,
which lends a sense of familiarity and security to the process. Likewise, some sex work-
ers choose to go on tour and use the Eros Guide network, and the website is set up to
put notices up on the profiles of sex workers who are in town on tour for a short amount
of time.
Though agencies that employ sex workers use advertising on Eros Guide and other
sites, it’s usually easy to tell the difference between agencies and independent workers.
The easy browsing feature on the site makes searching for independents a more reward-
ing prospect than it could be if independent workers’ sites were not linked in a common
space. Lily worked for escort agencies before trying her hand at independent work, which
she only did because the agencies she’d worked for were busted. She says, “I’m not sure
if I would have gone independent without the Internet, because I just wasn’t aware that
that was a possibility.” Initially, she says, “It was scary to be responsible for doing every-
thing on my own.” After learning the ropes of advertising and screening clients, and
starting to make connections with other sex workers, Lily began to love working on her
own because she was able to control so many different factors — from her image to her
schedule to her rates and the degree of interaction she had with clients before deciding
whether to see them.
In the trade up from Craigslist to Eros Guide, sex workers gain and lose power and
freedoms. On Craigslist, restrictions are put on postings by other members of the com-
munity, who can flag noncompliant postings for removal, and occasionally by the Craig-
slist staff, who may remove postings that blatantly disregard the rules that bar explicit
exchange of sex for money. However, the actual structure of the advertisements is totally
open to the poster’s discretion and can be as brief and vague or as long and detailed
(though not sexually explicit) as possible. Ads on Eros Guide look much more put to-
gether and typically feature professional photography instead of photos taken with a we-
bcam or a consumer-grade digital camera. Eros Guide ads are also scoured by their staff
for any hint of sexual activity; in fact, the word “sex” is not allowed at all. Additionally, the
limit on word count puts restrictions on what a sex worker can say about herself, which
is similar to the limitations in print ads. However, the advertisements do have the escape
valve of a link to the worker’s website, where she can say whatever she wants—within
the limits of what’s acceptable regarding the legal restrictions around the business of sex
work. Both websites allow and even encourage a sex worker to operate her own business,
whether or not she has her own website.
Both Craigslist and Eros Guide, albeit in different ways, exist as cultures beyond just
the listings for sex workers, which makes them not so different from print publications.
Their content may be about sex, but it’s not always pure advertising. In this respect, sex-
worker-advertising sites are increasingly becoming online communities where people
hang out to discuss different issues centered on sexuality, but the discussions also devi-
ate from this topic. These advertising/community sites have increasingly begun to look
54 C’Lick Me
more and more like dating sites, with their articles about sex and off-topic discussions.
This design and functionality crossover is an important one — it lessens the stigma of sex
work and hiring of sex workers by making it appear more like dating — just with required
“generosity” on the men’s behalf.
Dish and Bitch: The Message Boards

If the community and webzine aspect of advertising sites is a bit confusing and nudg-
es the sex industry away from pure commerce and into something else, the world of
message boards geared at sex workers and their clients (or providers and hobbyists, as
they are called on the boards) is infinitely more complex. Since the late 1990s, mes-
sage boards have emerged as the more highly interactive counterpart to advertising sites.
People who use the boards tend to also use advertising sites, though the reverse isn’t al-
ways true. Clients who use message boards on a regular basis tend to be very engaged
with the culture, referring to themselves as “hobbyists,” and referring to the act of hiring
sex workers as “the hobby” and the sex workers themselves as the “providers.” The slang
that sometimes appears on sites like Craigslist and Eros Guide runs rampant on mes-
sage boards, to the point that some of the postings are difficult to decipher for readers
outside the culture.
The key component of message boards like UtopiaGuide, Big Doggie, The Erotic
Review (TER), and Max Fisch are the reviews, submitted by men who have had sessions
with sex workers and want to report on them, ostensibly to give other hobbyists the in-
side scoop so they can make informed decisions about which women they want to see.
Though it varies, the boards tend to be password protected. Some, like Max Fisch, are
free to read and post on but require registration with a valid email address, while others,
like Big Doggie, can be perused in an abbreviated version for free, but require a paid
membership on the part of both providers and hobbyists in order to see full reviews or
to participate in board discussions. The boards create a space for providers and hobby-
ists to interact socially outside of private sessions. Explicit advertising is outright banned
on most boards, though providers are permitted to post notices about their whereabouts
and available days and times. Eve Ryder, a now-retired New York–based escort who pri-
marily used UtopiaGuide, says, “Many of the threads are about guys reviewing girls and
swapping tips and such, but interesting stuff is always appearing. I’ve seen threads there
where guys and girls openly debate how tips should work, for example. I’ve watched girls
attack johns who behave badly toward women—openly and with other girls and johns
backing them up! Imagine that ever happening before the days of boards.” In addition to
the spaces where providers and hobbyists can talk to one another, most boards also have
sections of the sites that are available only to providers or only to hobbyists.
For the providers, the boards are a mixed blessing. Jo, the dominatrix from New
York, spent some time as a moderator on the fetish and BDSM message boards for Max
Fisch, but she quickly tired of the drama and downright nastiness. She found many of the
men to be pushy and annoying: “They were always expressing their preferences, which
is generally okay, but they were being very judgmental and had screwed-up ideas about
what it means to be a true domina.” Because of the flame wars and general sniping on
the site, Max Fisch shut down its community boards and DomBoards and replaced them
with The Hang, a more heavily moderated and community-oriented board. Though
The Hang is more regulated than earlier incarnations of the boards, it would be naive to
expect that people will ever be completely polite on online message boards, especially
when dealing with matters like sexual preferences and fetishes, which have the tendency
to offend even (or perhaps especially) people who spend a lot of time in a sexualized en-
vironment and know what they do and do not like.
The review function of the message boards is the most controversial part of these types
of sites. In order to make the reviews a good and sexy read, hobbyists often embellish the
truth, which would not be such a bad thing if the changes were only in florid language,
but some hobbyists report on sex acts that providers are not actually willing to perform in
their sessions, setting a troubling precedent for women and future clients. Some boards
bestow special privileges and discounts on hobbyists who have written a certain number
of reviews, which results in the writing of bogus reviews of providers hobbyists haven’t
actually seen as they scramble to boost their numbers closer to whatever quota they are
trying to reach. A provider’s reviews can certainly affect her business, as many serious
hobbyists strictly pay attention to the boards and what their fellow men have to say about
the providers.
Eve, an active participant and often agitator on UtopiaGuide, says, “I once posted
a review of a client I had after he posted a ridiculous review about me claiming to have
done all kinds of acrobatic stuff. I posted what really happened, because I just didn’t care.
You know: ‘He was never really hard, and he has a bad back, so I had to be on top for the
thirty seconds it took him to come….’” Some of Eve’s experiences on the boards were
frustrating, to say the least, but overall the boards had a positive impact on her business.
During her career, Eve never paid for advertising, but her active participation on the
boards—especially when she was argumentative—drummed up plenty of business.
Though Lily recognizes the value of good reviews, she was extremely wary of the re-
view boards and how they affected client expectations, as well as her privacy and reputa-
tion. She made her clients aware of her rules: “They weren’t allowed to post on TER if
they wanted to see me again—that site just has a terrible reputation. I allowed them to
post on Big Doggie, but without writing about sex even with the lingo, and it did help
my business.”
The False Veil of Secrecy

Beyond the day-to-day mini-crises and controversies on the boards, several larger scan-
dals have erupted and brimmed over beyond the reaches of the message board commu-
nities in recent years. In the late 1990s, message boards, reviews, and online sex worker
advertising in general were a free-for-all. At that time, clients and workers felt that their
anonymity was protected on sites like Big Doggie and The Erotic Review, and that they
weren’t being watched or recorded by law enforcement, or that even if they were, they
were safe because they’d developed an intricate-enough slang and a clever-enough dis-
56 C’Lick Me
claimer (which still appears on many websites and which is intended to provide protec-
tion from the law):
Money exchanged is intended for companionship only and modeling services. Anything
else that may or may not occur is a matter of personal choice between two consenting
adults of legal age and is not contracted for, nor is it requested to be contracted for in
any manner. This is not an offer of prostitution.
On the boards, which participants view as private, membership-based spaces that

are not open-to-the-public forums, explicit sexual acts were often described and dollar
amounts provided. As it turns out, law enforcement did start to take an interest in on-
line action. A Florida State attorney launched a two-year investigation of Big Doggie in
2000. The operation, stealthily called “Operation Flea Collar,” targeted hobbyists by
creating profiles on the site for fake providers. The vice squad went so far as to buy stock
images of a lingerie-clad woman around whom they built a website that was a convinc-
ing facsimile of a real escort’s site — eventually, that is, as it took a little trial and error
for them to get clients interested in their provider. When the vice squad felt it had gath-
ered sufficient evidence to definitively accuse Big Doggie of being a conduit for illegal
activities, they pounced on the co-owners of the site, Charles Kelly and Steve Lipson,
who were charged, along with eleven other men, with more than fifty felony racketeer-
ing, procurement, and obstruction charges in July 2002. In December 2002, a judge
dismissed charges, ultimately deciding that the message boards were a protected form of
free speech.
A big part of the message board scare was linked to the inherent sexism of the legal
system when it comes to prostitution: Female workers are the ones most often arrested
and made an example of, while the men who purchase their services or facilitate the
business stroll away without incident. In this instance, however, the men were being
targeted in what is sometimes called a reverse sting. It’s interesting to note that “reverse
sting” acknowledges the fact that the women are the real targets when it comes to law
enforcement around prostitution. It also begs the question: Would there have been such
calamity over the message boards in the summer of 2002 if the providers been the targets
rather than the clients? Probably not.
Though today Big Doggie is once again the powerhouse it was before the bust, vice
squads throughout the country have started to employ online advertising and commu-
nities to make arrests. But it’s sex workers rather than clients who need to be most con-
cerned about the increasing interest of the legal community in online spaces. Since
providers cycle in and out of the industry so quickly, there isn’t a strong sense of history
or awareness about the types of things they should avoid when pursuing their online sex
businesses. New providers often make the same mistakes that providers and hobbyists
made half a decade ago: They give too much information about their precise services
and what they will and will not do for their rates, while also naively assuming that they’re
anonymous. Though clients often express concerns about discretion, their worries are
mostly about wives and families, while the risks that sex workers undertake are a real and
present danger. This danger does not just come from outside the business, either; it often
comes from within.
I’ve Got Your Back

In the sex-negative, guilt-ridden, judgmental society we live in, the leap in people’s
minds from sex to danger is a short one indeed. And I’m not even talking about BDSM
play, but just regular ol’ fucking. Add commerce to sex and you’ve got a formula for all
kinds of fear and guilt, not to mention tsk-tsking and “I told you so’s” when a sex worker
gets into an ugly situation. Double up this whore stigma with the stigma of Internet
weirdos, and you’ve got a scornful-nearing-gleeful newspaper article waiting to be writ-
ten. Though many sex workers report never having had a violent client, violence against
sex workers is the number one thing that the press pays attention to. This is more often
about sending the message that sex and violence go hand in hand than it is a warning
that this is something awful that should be stopped.
Despite general assumptions that have led to sex work being voted the job most likely
to get you chopped up and stuffed in garbage bags, the non-sex-working public is often
surprised to learn that sex workers have elaborate systems for screening potential clients.
Though screening and safety systems existed before the Internet—clients were some-
times approved through word of mouth from other workers and discreet but investigative
phone calls to the client’s place of business were made—the Internet has streamlined the
process. Screening serves a dual purpose: to confirm that a potential client is pleasant to
deal with and not dangerous or a rip-off artist and to prevent those who work in illegal
parts of the industry from getting busted.
DIY Screening
Most ladies do some, if not all, of their client screening themselves. For the purposes of
this book, I’m primarily concerned with middle-class sex workers who use the Internet
as their primary source of obtaining clients and who work independently or in collabo-
ration with a few other women. I am not addressing the experiences of street workers
who advertise their wares by being present on a stroll known to be a place where com-
mercial sex can be acquired, because they are beginning and ending their transactions
in person rather than online. However, it’s important to note that street workers, like In-
ternet workers, often have very tight-knit systems of checking in with one another.
Independent workers who work through the Internet rely on several different forms of
free screening. Before they even get to that point, they first decide what level of informa-
tion they require from a potential new client before agreeing to a session with him. Levels
of screening vary from worker to worker; it’s a matter that can cause cattiness and judg-
ment between fellow sex workers because oftentimes one provider may perceive another
as being too lax or overly paranoid. Some sex workers simply require a few exchanges of
email in which they assess the client’s general behavior and determine whether he brings
up anything illegal (“How much for a blow job?”) in his initial correspondence. This first
58 C’Lick Me
level of screening, before and sometimes without the exchange of personal information,
tends to be the most basic and can simply be based on a gut feeling in regard to both
safety and compatibility issues. Most sex workers are not just concerned with their safety
and well-being, but also with their general sanity, and the question “Is this guy going to
annoy the hell out of me for the hour we’re together?” is usually a much more pressing
one than “Is he going to ax murder me?”
For providers who take screening measures beyond gut feelings and correspondence
with a client, a simple electronic check is the next step—and a lazy but curious girl’s best
friend. Just as many women have taken to Googling a potential date’s personal informa-
tion, many sex workers poke around the Internet in search of any and all information
they can find about potential clients. Providers Google a client’s email addresses, phone
numbers, names, businesses, and whatever other shred of personal information the men
provide. For the most part, this kind of search isn’t going to yield any kind of “this man is
mean to hookers” explicit warning, but it may deliver vacation photos, a flan-recipe blog,
or boring PowerPoint presentations about a company’s gains and losses—all of which
contribute to a better sense of who the man is in the real world. If a client is unwilling to
provide his real name and the provider doesn’t insist on it, his online nickname or handle
may be more than useful, because such men are likely to have set up email accounts
specifically for their illicit affairs. These handles may lead the intrepid provider to client-
and-provider message board discussions starring the man in question.
Message Boards and Bad-Date Lists

Though message boards have their fair share of both comedy and tragedy as a sparring
ground between providers and clients, it’s worth going into the fact that they’re a valu-
able resource for women who want to have contact with other providers, and also for
those who want to sniff about for signs of insanity or general disrespect in a potential
client. More than that, public as well as membership-based message boards serve as
an interesting counterpoint to something that has grown out of the ease of information
sharing online: the bad-date list. Networks of sex workers, especially call girls, have al-
ways tended to maintain their own internal blacklists with the tacit agreement that no
girl in their particular circle will see such-and-such a client for whatever infraction they
deem serious enough. Those internal support systems aside, the Internet has led to an
increase in this type of information sharing.
Private provider-discussion Listservers, like the one run by Prostitutes of New York
(PONY), require a reference before a new provider can get on the list, and they often
have posts about trends in local and national law enforcement, sex worker news, and the
ever-important bad-date list. Providers circulate information meant to assist and protect
their fellow workers, and the information can include anything from “He smelled weird
and shorted me on my rate” to “This guy was high on something, freaked out, and pinned
me against a wall when our hour was up.” When possible, providers describe the clients
they wish to make persona non grata in as much detail as possible, including images and
driver’s licenses if they have them, as well as email and phone contacts. Once these de-
tails circulate, local sex workers band together and won’t see that client, and they’ll work
to circulate the information to warn other colleagues. Bad-date lists generally do a great
service to providers without exposing the clients to the whole world, though there are
instances where other sex workers on the list may encourage a fellow provider to go to
the police if she’s been assaulted.
The popularity and ease of self-publishing on the Internet via blogs and websites has
led to the rise of public bad-date lists and blacklists. This is due, in part, to the ease with
which workers can put up and update their own sites. While sex workers are unanimous
in their support of private bad-date lists, which help to keep providers safe and encour-
age a sense of community and concern for other workers, there is much debate over the
value of public bad-date lists.
The primary argument in favor of public bad-date lists is that by posting even a little
bit of a client’s information, like an email handle that he may use only for communicat-
ing with sex workers, the client is being held accountable. A public bad-date list does not
require any kind of registration or exchange of information to gain access. This makes
the list a powerful tool for sex workers who are not connected to other workers in their
area, but who have Internet access and stumble across the list. Though groups run by
sex workers are usually very diligent about their members’ privacy, some sex workers are
hesitant to trust other sex workers. Public bad-date lists published by sex workers directly
serve the workers: The lists supply the information without requiring that the sex worker
provide identifying details. Lars Ollson, who runs Don’t Fuck with Us!, a blacklist blog
for sex workers around Washington, D.C., maintains that “making the list public isn’t to
shame the client, but to motivate him to fix the situation, and to show that we all talk to
each other.”2 Many clients may not be aware that sex workers talk to each other. Away
from the comfort of message boards, only die-hard hobbyists spend lots of time in the
company of like-minded enthusiasts. (At least as far as they know.) However, intentional
or not, if a client’s phone number or email turns up in a Google search that leads to a
blog that derides him for being mean to prostitutes he hires, that could probably be con-
strued as shaming.
Whereas the private bad-date list only serves the purpose of warning providers about
dangerous, unpleasant, or time-wasting clients, public blacklists serve two purposes:
warning providers and embarrassing clients. Of course, a client gives up his right to pri-
vacy and discretion (the things that keep the sex industry moving along) the moment he
robs or physically assaults a girl he has hired. And working girls often win cases against
clients who assault them, despite the fact that they’re sometimes in the throes of an il-
legal act when something like this happens. However, some of the incidents that qualify
clients for public bad-date lists fall into more of a gray area. On Don’t Fuck with Us!,
the most common offense is a “no call, no show” (NCNS in the industry lingo) appoint-
ment, which is when a client establishes and confirms a date and time but then isn’t
heard from again—or is maybe heard from after a bit of time passes and he wants to set
up another appointment. This kind of infraction, though annoying and disrespectful,
comes with the territory of being a sex worker; clients will occasionally flake out due to
60 C’Lick Me
cold feet, discovery by wives, last-minute change of plans, or a number of other excuses
that may or may not be valid. When a client violates the basic etiquette of a session in a
way that shows his ignorance of the situation but not his maliciousness, having his infor-
mation posted on a public bad-date list puts his infraction on the same level as those of
guys who push sex workers’ limits.
The NCNS client is a close cousin to the time waster. One of the curses and bless-
ings of the availability of ads for erotic hire on the Internet is that it sets up almost infinite
opportunities for window-shopping. Because of the absence of face-to-face communica-
tion, online window-shopping often extends past looking and into emailing. However,
providers quickly get acquainted with the tactics of time wasters and learn to sniff them
out. These are guys who ask lots of questions that are thinly veiled attempts at acquir-
ing masturbatory material; they are vague about what they want and when and where
they want it. The New York– and New Jersey–area blog Black List is composed almost
entirely of lists of the emails of the time-wasting men who populate Craigslist’s Erotic
Services board.
Though clients, like service providers, are initially careful about concealing personal
information, things like phone numbers, which most providers require before agreeing
to an appointment, are easily traceable online through reverse-lookup services that give
the street address of whatever phone number is plugged into the system. As a result, it’s
fairly easy to link blacklisted men to their real-world identities: A simple Google search
turned up the real names and home addresses of several men on the Don’t Fuck with Us!
blog. Although men who remove condoms without telling their partner or cross physical
boundaries certainly deserve to be reprimanded at the very least, clients with more-minor
infractions are subject to blacklist-wielding providers’ whims as well, creating a power
dynamic based on shame and what could turn into blackmail.
Other than the whole personal-information-posted-online- without-consent thing, a
major side effect of public bad-date lists is that men who make good dates fear that their
personal information will wind up broadcast all over the Internet. After they’ve seen some
examples of the infractions men commit to land themselves on bad-date lists, I’m sure
that many potential clients shy away from making appointments. Likewise, sex workers
who mock would-be clients’ phone messages and emails on public forums are potentially
driving away perfectly harmless clients, who cower in fear from Internet wrath and keep
their wallets safely in their pockets. Some might perceive the posting of minor infractions
as sex workers acting out in various ways, but the reality is that sex workers are expected
to always be well behaved, while clients are not; clients are often less afraid of the con-
sequences of misbehaving because of that old “customer is always right” mentality—not
to mention their sense of male entitlement. Public blacklists are a way for sex workers to
anonymously lash out at bad and irritating clients. In essence, this functions as a solid
counterpart to the posting of anonymous reviews by clients who basically claim that the
providers need to be well behaved or be out of business.
Public bad-date lists might have their share of problems, including the fact that they
can spur a particularly litigious client into legal action. However, they do serve their pur-
pose well. The freedom to post information about bad clients allows sex workers to alert
each other to clients to avoid — the next time this client’s email or phone number gets
Googled as part of a screening process, it will lead to the bad-date list, which wouldn’t
happen if the list were on an email list or password-protected message board. Public lists
may likewise get the attention of the men who are on them and are either directed to the
site — as Don’t Fuck with Us! asks providers to do—or find it through vanity Googling,
and they will know they’re being watched and disapproved of, much in the way that pro-
viders know this through reviews clients write.
High Tech Verification

Posting a client’s information online breaks with most clients’ top priority: being discreet
(or that cringe-worthy common Internet misspelling, “discrete”). Though providers are
at a higher risk of attracting the attention of law enforcement than their clients, wheth-
er a sex worker is discreet is one of the most common questions posed by clients when
seeking out a provider. This question has two unspoken dimensions to it: The first is
“Please don’t show up at my hotel looking like the hookers I see on TV;” and the other
is “Please be very careful with the personal information I give you.” Just as different pro-
viders have requirements around how much information they need about a potential
client before they see him, clients’ comfort levels vary from person to person. As the sex
industry becomes increasingly professionalized, what information is required is becom-
ing more standardized, which has opened up the market to businesses whose sole pur-
pose is the sharing and protection of information.
The most widely used of these services are Room Service 2000, often referred to as
RS2K, and Date-Check, which is popular among escorts and occasionally used by in-
dependently operating dominatrices. Both sex workers and their potential clients need
to sign up to use the system — and clients have to pay a one-time membership fee. The
client is required to submit a heap of personal information, including his full name and
credit card information, as well as a home and work address, the name of the company
he works for, and his position and title. This information is not passed directly on to the
provider, but it must be given for membership so that a provider can rest assured that
the client checked out when the website’s staff followed up on his points of contact. The
purpose here for Date-Check is the approving of the client, which gives providers the se-
curity that the client they are in touch with has passed a background check. RS2K creates
a buffer between the provider and her client’s personal details, which many clients like
because it means that their information is not at risk in the provider’s hands and they’re
reducing the risk of transmitting their personal information over the largely unsecured
Internet by having to go through the process just once rather than repeatedly. Providers
who list RS2K as a verification option sometimes give a discount for their sessions set up
using RS2K. In addition to their role as providers of screening, both websites have also
evolved into escort-advertising sites, making them sort of one-stop-shopping operations.
Though these sites certainly fill a need and step the escorting business up a notch—
out of the shadow realm of strange business dealings—they also create a new kind of mid-
62 C’Lick Me
dleman between the worker and her client. This can be both helpful and a hindrance.
Services like RS2K are a marker of the upscaling of escort businesses and a recognition
by business owners that there is legal money to be made from the sex industry. This ser-
vice, therefore, removes some of the power of interaction from an independent provider.
While many providers may be willing, even happy, to surrender the tedious and often
frustrating task of verifying a client’s identity, it nudges them away from independence
and one step closer to signing up with an escort agency or having their hard-earned mon-
ey soaked up in payments for other “necessary” services.
Lily, whose escorting career started when she worked for a Manhattan agency, took
on the responsibility of doing screening herself after going independent and prefers it
that way. She says, “I didn’t like the idea of putting screening into a third party’s hands.
I feel like I’m safer verifying a client myself.” Other sex workers who use the verification
services available feel that the companies offer a veneer of legitimacy. Beverly Fisher, an
escort from Denver, Colorado, disagrees with the idea that a third-party service is a hin-
drance, and says, “I see these services as a help for providers, and they help the clients
feel secure, like they don’t have to give providers all this extra information.”
Sex Worker Activism

Sex workers and businesses that take measures to protect them demonstrate a commit-
ment to making the sex industry a bit more organized, at least when it comes to the
topic of safety and making a profit. However, since the late 1970s, a growing number
of people involved in the sex industry have started to argue for and debate about sex
workers’ rights, supporting causes ranging from labor rights for legalized workers (like
strippers in the United States) to decriminalization of prostitution in places where it’s il-
legal to the more general and less quantifiable struggle against the stigmas of being a sex
worker in most parts of the world. Just as the Internet has transformed advertising for sex
workers, it has increased the capacity for coalition building for sex-worker-rights activists
on both the local and global levels. Since the advent of the Internet and its communi-
cation tools, sex worker organizations that existed prior to the Internet have adapted to
using the new technology, and projects that might not have been possible without the
Internet have been launched and carried out.
Prostitutes of New York (PONY), a thirty-year-old sex worker support and activism
group that distributes information to its members through a moderated email list that
requires a recommendation to join, was once operated solely by sending discreet mail-
ings about events and actions affecting sex workers. Its members maintained a phone tree
to notify each other about meetings, as well as bad dates. PONY’s website is a one-page
informational site without any bells or whistles—or even its own domain—that’s main-
tained its exact same look since it was launched in 1996. The page offers minimal but
adequate information about the group; due to its simplicity, it seems as if PONY activities
don’t take place online. Though it’s true that there aren’t any public online forums as-
sociated with the organization, it has moved most of its written communications services
online. This shift has certainly attracted new members who aren’t necessarily ready to
make contact in person or by phone, or who aren’t willing to provide a mailing address,
but it has also contributed to the loss of members who aren’t technically savvy enough to
use the Internet or who don’t have access due to financial constraints.
Like PONY, the Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) was formed before the Inter-
net became widely accessible and was transformed as the Internet made its way into the
homes and workplaces of more activists. Activists Cheryl Overs and Paulo Longo hatched
the idea for NSWP in 1991, and formalized it in 1992 to promote sex workers’ health
and human rights. By 1997, the NSWP Listserv was running strong, and its existence has
facilitated international communication and collaboration. Critics of NSWP say that
since going online the project has become increasingly American in terms of the voices
represented. This is mostly due to the fact that 75 percent of Americans have Internet
access, while in many developing countries, less than 5 percent of the population has ac-
cess. This is certainly a limiting factor, but the gains and time saving that have resulted
from the move online have made an immense impact within the activism community.
Melissa Ditmore, who works with NSWP, says, “The Internet has brought higher levels
of dialogue because the conversation is wider. Language is a huge issue—not only what
languages people can use for communication (English is the online standard for interna-
tional communication), but also the very words chosen. Specific issues, even things about
which everyone agrees, have to be presented differently in different contexts. Stronger
language is used in some places, while greater tact is required elsewhere.” Through the
unity the Internet brings, it also underscores international differences.
These differences — both as obstacles and unifying forces—are part of what drove Ana
Lopes and her colleagues to form The International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW). The
union is a part of Britain’s general union, GMB, and its benefits are strongest for its mem-
bers. In January 2006, for example, the union won its first-ever unfair-dismissal case for a sex
worker, against Essex-based phone sex company Datapro Services Limited.3 In this case, a
phone sex operator and IUSW union member named Irene Everitt, who had worked for
Datapro for eight years, was fired after having been accused of gross industrial misconduct.
The union sued Datapro for her job and won. Though it’s not as effective in countries
outside of the UK, IUSW owes its international presence to the Internet. Says cofounder
Lopes, “I cannot imagine how my colleagues and I could have founded The International
Union of Sex Workers without the Internet. It was and is absolutely fundamental. It was
through reading other sex worker organizations’ websites that we became aware that sex
workers all over the world were demanding to be treated as workers. It was through email
and Internet discussion lists that our positions were formed, our policies developed.”
Sex workers’ activists groups aren’t necessarily a unified front, on the Internet or else-
where. Unions appeal to a small subset of sex workers who do work that can be union-
ized, like stripping and phone sex, which are legal in most places. For workers whose
jobs are illegal or who fear that unionization will take away some of the appealing pieces
of the sex industry — its flexible hours and the potential to earn a lot of money in a short
time — unionization is not a primary concern. On the Internet, perhaps the most power-
ful way that sex workers disagree with sex-worker-rights groups is by disregarding them
64 C’Lick Me
entirely. While the more politically active groups focus on issues like unionization and
decriminalization of prostitution, many sex workers use the Internet solely to advertise
and connect with other sex workers in a social and business framework that they don’t
see as political in any way.
Melissa Gira, a San Francisco-based activist and one-woman Internet sexuality phe-
nomenon, is keenly aware of the role that online advertising has played in banding sex
workers together in ways that may not seem overtly political to them, but become so over
time. Though she began her sex work career as a dancer, Gira didn’t begin to discuss
the industry with other sex-workers until she began doing alt porn modeling online in
1999. At that point, she began meeting people through LiveJournal who were having
similar experiences. In the fall of 2000, a LiveJournal friend of Gira’s got arrested for es-
corting, which led to an uproar online, followed by pointed conversations among other
sex workers about the wrongs of the sex industry and what they could do about these is-
sues together.
For Gira, a major point of power was her ability to create her own media online.
Whereas PONY, NSWP, and the IUSW had all hired people to make and maintain their
websites, Gira struck out on her own and built her own sites for creating porn (on her
now-defunct site RadicalFaeries), camming (initially on NakkidNerds and then Beautiful
Toxin), and blogging (at LiveJournal and various incarnations of her own sites: Sacred
Whore and Melissa Gira). For Gira, the Internet facilitated offline sessions with clients,
but perhaps more importantly, it created online opportunities for doing business and col-
laborating with other women. Gira says, “Porn on the web was a way to get all the models
talking to each other, and learning to do my own site and run my own business was politi-
cal for me then.” For many women, business and politics weave together in intricate ways.
This is not to say that all sex workers who talk to each other online become politicized
by sharing their experiences in a sort of “consciousness raising for the Internet genera-
tion” scenario. Gira, for instance, had already been working in a politicized environment
before making her own website and running her own business; for other women politics
don’t come into play unless their business is affected. Even so, threats to sex workers’
businesses and safety don’t necessarily turn most workers into activists overnight (or at
all): sometimes because they don’t want to spend more time than absolutely necessary on
their work, sometimes because they don’t want to risk a greater degree of exposure, and
sometimes because they just don’t care and want to be left alone to do their work.
The younger generation of sex workers—which really just comprises women who are
five or ten years younger than the women who started groups like PONY and NSWP—
turns to the Internet rather matter-of-factly for advertising, information,and resources.
Women like Gira found community on the Internet partly because they were seeking it
out, but also because they were already spending social, working, and information-gath-
ering time online. Creating a network and support community among sex workers was a
natural progression for Gira and her colleagues.
In the summer of 2006, the swirl of online sex worker activism came to a head with
the Desiree Alliance’s four-day-long sex workers’ conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Gira
and I were both members of the conference’s official media team. Gira told me that the
conference was “the first sex worker conference in the United States that I know of or-
ganized by mostly Internet-based sex workers using the net to organize the conference
itself.” Stacey Swimme, one of the conference’s organizers, echoes a point Melissa Dit-
more has made: that organizing online made it possible for an entire group of people to
be involved in the organizational process in a way that is actually democratic and respon-
sibility sharing. “Because of the Internet,” Swimme says, “we had more community buy-
in to the conference. More women felt responsible for and connected to what was going
on in the planning stages, so it made for a better and stronger conference.”
The strength of gathering on the Internet was very much apparent at the conference,
where many conversations among young women about day-to-day sex worker issues like
advertising, photographs, and safety hovered around issues connected to the Internet.
The women who came together at the conference, many meeting in person for the first
time after lengthy correspondence online, were technically adept and overwhelmingly
young — though young isn’t necessarily a shift away from what sex workers always have
been. Swimme believes that “the sex-worker-rights movement would not have moved
forward without the Internet, because the Internet links independent workers who are
flexible in terms of class, work, and time available to work on activism projects.”
Social activism has long been the province of middle-class, college-educated white
kids, and judging by the attendees at the Desiree Alliance’s conference, the sex workers’
rights movement isn’t much different. Independence from pimps and harsh economic
situations is the norm for sex worker activists — most women who are highly active in the
movement don’t work for agencies or other kinds of bosses, and many don’t have chil-
dren. Street workers are a minority in the activism scene, though the women who are
street workers and involved with activism are not hesitant to make their presence known.
After all, they’ve typically gone through a lot to be able to tell their stories. Most sex work-
ers’ rights advocates who aren’t street workers are keenly aware of the class disparities
within the ranks, and are concerned with diversity and representation, but are also wary
of speaking for other women and their needs.
Though it’s nearly impossible to characterize an average sex worker, the half-joking
T-shirt that reads I SUPPORT SINGLE MOMS next to an illustration of a stripper on a
pole is clearly based on the belief that many single mothers enter the sex industry because
of the potential for high earnings over a short time coupled with the appeal of a flexible
work schedule. It’s true that there are plenty of single moms who work as sex workers, and
most of their activism is limited to online work, since the need for a flexible schedule is
the very thing that prevents them from uprooting and attending a sex worker conference
for several days. Their activism may stay online, or their voices may not be heard at all
because of the financial and time constraints of earning an income and supporting and
raising children. Single moms often choose the sex industry and forego standard middle-
class comforts in favor of flexible schedules and an income that isn’t fixed. The class di-
vide, especially when it comes to the Internet, is very strong, and when the jump from
online to in-person interaction occurs, it becomes even more apparent.
66 C’Lick Me
As the Internet has increasingly brought sex workers together, they have formed com-
munities with people in their towns as well as across the globe. They continue to maintain
their separate spaces as well, and to be guarded and suspicious of each other in certain
areas, which is a natural outgrowth of this line of work. Activism has been part and parcel
of the online shift toward being more connected for sex workers, and though the Inter-
net has enabled conversations to happen across the world about sex workers’ issues and
has allowed collaborations and comparisons of models to happen in a powerful way, sex
worker activism online has not just been about chatting and emailing, but about real co-
alition building. So much about activism and coalition building is essentially about com-
munication, and the ease and speed of the Internet — at least for those who have access to
it—brings both communication and activism to a whole new level. In this respect, even
sex workers who are not interested in joining activist networks benefit from the work and
awareness of other sex workers.
notes
1 “Sex work,’ is a phrase that was coined by self-proclaimed whore activist Scarlot
Harlot in the late 1970s to refer to the explicit exchange of erotic labor for a mutu-
ally agreed upon amount of money, goods, or services. Though “sex work” is often
considered to be a euphemism for prostitution, the sex industry encompasses many
different kinds of work—stripping, naked oil wrestling, phone sex, domination, and
panty hose modeling, to name a few—many of which never involve genital contact
and some of which don’t involve any kind of physical contact at all. Just as there
are many different kinds of sex work, workers have many names for the work they
do. More politically active folks tend to refer to themselves as “sex workers,” which
is linked right up with socialisty, labor organizey folks (even if those same people
don’t connect themselves with the struggles of said sex workers). Most women
in the industry identify themselves with respect to their specific job: escort, porn
performer, dancer, masseuse, dominatrix. Despite the names different types of per-
formers and service workers prefer, I will be using the term “sex work” throughout
this chapter, though when quoting workers, I have left their lingo usage intact, and
I refer to the workers however they choose to refer to themselves.
2 Lars Ollson and Tracy Quan. “Positions: Are Public Client Blacklists a Good
Idea?” $pread Magazine (Summer 2006): 10.
3 “Sex Workers: GMB Wins First Ever Unfair Dismissal Case,” Independent Media
Center (2006), www.indymedia.org/nl/2006/01/832371.shtml.
WEBSITES
THE BEST OF BLOGS: Annual reader-nominated and voted on awards for blogs in
many different categories, including Best Sex Blog.
www.thebestofblogs.com
BEVERLY FISHER: Denver-based escort and writer.

www.beverlyfisher.com
BLACK LIST: a New York– and New Jersey–area blog that is seldom updated but has
several extensive lists of emails used by men who attempt to hire providers through
Craigslist.
http://providerblacklist.blogspot.com
CATHERINE LA CROIX: Catherine does sex work and sexuality consultation, which
she details on her website. She is also the author of the self-published book On Our
Backs, Off Our Knees: A Declaration of Independence by a Modern Sacred Whore.
http://catherinelacroix.com
DENZI: Denzi is a middle-aged escort who used the Internet to remake herself after a
career in her teens and early twenties as a street prostitute.
http://denzi4u.com
DON’T FUCK WITH US!: Run by a Washington, D.C.–area male escort, mostly male
workers in and around D.C. list their grievances with various clients, whose aliases and
phone numbers they post.
http://blacklistednow.blogspot.com
THE INTERNATIONAL UNION OF SEX WORKERS: Sex workers union most ac-
tive in the U.K. that uses the Internet as an organizing tool.
www.iusw.org
MAX FISCH DOMINA GUIDE: The premier site for listings and links to the websites of
professional dommes around the United States. Also hosts a very active discussion board.
http://maxfisch.com
NETWORK OF SEX WORK PROJECTS (NSWP): Project linking together sex work
projects from around the globe; members’ meetings often take place online.
www.nswp.org
68 C’Lick Me
PROSTITUTES OF NEW YORK (PONY): New York City–based organization for sex
workers with a thirty-year history.
www.walnet.org/csis/groups/pony.html
ROOM SERVICE 2000 AND DATE-CHECK: Websites that offer client-verification

services for escorts.
http://roomservice2000.com.
http://date-check.com
UTOPIAGUIDE, BIG DOGGIE, THE EROTIC REVIEW (TER): Message board

and advertising websites where providers and hobbyists can interact and hobbyists can
review providers.
http://utopiaguide.com
www.bigdoggie.net
www.theeroticreview.com
VERONICA MONET: Veronica is a former sex worker who offers sexuality education
and consultations and is the author of Veronica Monet’s Sex Secrets of Escorts: What
Men Really Want.
http://veronicamonet.com
Copyright 2007 by Audacia Ray from Naked on the Internet: Hookups Downloads and
Cashing in on Internet Sexploration. Printed by permission of Seal Press (www.seal-
press.com) and imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
69
Netporn:
the Work of Fantasy
in the Information Society
Adam Arvidsson
‘The industrialization, through home computers, of physical and psychical care

and hygiene, children’s education, cooking or sexual technique is precisely desig-
nated to generate capitalist profits from activities still left to individual fantasy.’
(Gorz, 1982:84)
‘What do the punters want from us?[..]Right now, it’s the psychological part that is
most important[...] With the kind of clients I have, the real work is not so much physi-
cal as it is intellectual.’
- Lucrezia
‘We sell an idea. On the street they sell pieces of meat.’

- Luciana.
‘In Colombia people fuck much more. The whores do it, and other women do it too.
Here it seems men mostly take their pleasure in thinking up things.’
- Patricia.
For Lucrezia, Luciana and Patrizia, up-market sex-workers interviewed by Alessando dal
Lago and Emilio Quadrelli in their brilliant survey of the hidden life of a contempo-
rary European metropolis (dal Lago & Quadrelli, 2003:208-209), the most important
aspects of their metiér is intellectual and cerebral. It is their capacity to pretend and
perform; to make up situations and relations that satisfies the demands of their middle
class professional clients, and as Luciana comments, sets them off from the ‘meat mar-
70 C’Lick Me
ket’ on the street where working-class men go. Furthermore, the stories told in dal Lago
& Quadrelli’s book indicate that at least among middle and upper class clients, the de-
mand for more ‘advanced’ , ‘cerebral’ (or ‘kinky’) services has increased in recent years.
Certainly, the enriched media environment — video cassettes in the 1980s and Internet
porn in the 1990s — has greatly enhanced the erotic imaginary of the European middle
classes (McNair, 1996, O’Toole, 1998). As an industry with about twice the turn-over of
the Disney corporation, and with a highly differentiated structure (operators range from
large vertically integrated companies to small amateur enterprises), Internet porn offers
any conceivable kind of kink at just a couple of mouse-clicks’ distance (Cronin & Dav-
enport, 2001, Lane, 2000). Patricia’s comparison with Columbia (presumably based on
personal experience) is suggestive (if far from conclusive) in this respect. Is it the case
that where the habit of surfing the net for thrills is less widespread, sex is generally more
corporal and direct? While in relatively well-wired Northern Italy men are used to in-
vesting time and energy in their fantasies and want comparable Real Life performances?
Looking at the turnover and popularity of Internet porn one could suggest that the three
women’s experiences with increasingly cerebral sexual demands could be a side effect
of the further ‘industrialisation of fantasy’ that André Gorz predicted be a consequence
of the spread of computers and information technologies. These technologies have en-
hanced the capacity to fantasise about things like sex. This, one could hypothesise, has
produced more advanced and more fantastic demands on the part of the consumers of
sex worker services. If this is true, then the ‘industrialisation of fantasy’ on the part of
new media technologies has re-positioned such fantasising from a private, essentially
recreational and non-productive activity, to an integral, productive element of the value
chain of the booming sex/porn industry. How, this chapter asks, can we understand this
new relation between technology, fantasy and value theoretically?
The (immaterial) labour of fantasy

While (decreasingly) marginal to respectable academic debates, the porn industry
seems to supply a paradigm case for the emerging ‘new’ or ‘second’ (in the sense of Web
2.0) information economy. This not only in the sense that the porn industry has been a
driving factor behind the development of new technologies (like Real Time Streaming)
and new media forms (like the Amateur genre), but also in the sense that the subjec-
tive relations (or forms of ‘interpellation’ to use Althusser’s old term) promoted by porn
(both on and off line) are becoming exemplary of the ways in which consumers or view-
ers are positioned as value producing subjects by the new information economy in gen-
eral. Phenomena like SecondLife, MySpace, the booming Internet dating sector and
most of what is known as Web 2.0, are increasingly based on the ability of viewers to pro-
duce affective relations to others in the absence of ‘meaty’ embodiments. Such fantasis-
ing about the other is precisely what porn consumers have engaged in ever since the
inception — sometime in the mid-1700s — of modern pornography. The new element
in online porn, as in Web 2.0 more generally, is that such fantasising is now becoming
critical not only to the realisation of value (where Marx placed it, but also to the produc-
tion of value (cf. Miranda, 1998). The imagination is empowered, but it is also put to
work as an important source of profits.
This affective productivity has itself been greatly empowered by new information and
communication technologies.
Internet porn thus shows how an emerging productive power — a media enhanced
capacity to imagine and relate, which is itself a consequence of the particular sociological
and technological features of the information society — can be subsumed under capital
as a source of surplus value.
Seen this way, Internet porn is but one aspect of a more general trend to commodify
our ability to construct a common social world through communicative interaction, put-
ting it to work in generating economically valuable outcomes (Arendt, 1958, Habermas
1984, 1987, Hardt & Negri, 2004). Indeed, one can argue that such a movement towards
the commodification of the common constitutes an emerging paradigm of valorisation in
e-commerce (as well as in other vanguard sectors like software development, biotech,
brand management and design). The first strategy that guided the commercialisation of
the Internet in the mid – 1990s built mainly on a vision of that medium as a new chan-
nel for the provision of content. The key to making money online was to capture con-
sumers, or ‘eye-balls,’ to whom one (commercial sectors?) could subsequently broadcast
ready-made products through new channels. This was the economic rationale behind
the merger of large media companies with large content libraries, like Time-Warner with
Internet portals, like AOL. Even though this strategy allowed for a certain amount of ‘in-
teractivity’ (as to the choice of feature and time of viewing), it basically replicated an older
broadcasting logic in which content was understood as produced by professionals, and
then broadcast to a public of consumers. But already the success of AOL in accumulating
a critical mass of ‘eyeballs’ built on different relations between ‘producers’ and ‘consum-
ers.’ To a large extent AOL’s success derived from the unpaid efforts of tens of thousands
of volunteers who administered online communities, actively contributed to discussion
groups and built and maintained websites. It is estimated that in 1996, ‘at the peak of the
volunteer movement, over 30.000 community leaders were helping AOL to generate at
least $7 million a month’ (Terranova, 2004:92). The success of AOL thus already built on
the ability to put the communicative production of users to work. Stretching the defini-
tion a bit, we can argue that a similar principle stands behind more recent forms of media
voyeurism, like web-cams or reality television, where viewers interact and engage in a
‘work of watching’ that effectively extends the production of valuable content to include
the social and communicative processes of the life-world (Andrejevic, 2003).
This strategy actively utilises the interactive bias of the medium. It builds on putting
to work, stimulating or empowering the human ability to create a common through in-
vestments of affect. To quote one Merrill Lynch consultant: ‘to say that the Internet is
about information is the same as saying that cooking is about oven temperature — right,
but wrong. The real creator of value is relationships’ (Schrage, 1997). This relational ca-
pacity is then made to evolve in such ways that it creates an enclosable area for which one
can charge access fees or it is made to sustain a distinct brand identity.
72 C’Lick Me
The commodification of affect is nothing new in itself. Already Karl Marx recognised
the potential value of the production of common meanings and aesthetic experiences,
through the labour of singers, schoolmasters and poets. But he considered these activities
so marginal in relation to capitalist production overall that it was not worth wasting much
intellectual energy on them. Until recently most economists — Marxists or not — have
shared this view of immaterial production as economically insignificant. We can date the
rediscovery of immaterial labour to the 1970s when feminist economists began to argue
for the productivity of housework and the mostly female production of affect and care in
general. It accelerated in the 1980s as the developing service economy was the subject
of a host of studies of service professionals, like air-line stewardesses and retail personnel.
Recently, the focus on immaterial labour has come to invest the new culture industries
or ‘creative industries’ and the contemporary ‘creative’ workforce as such. An important
part of the productivity of such knowledge-intensive professional workers is understood to
rest with their capacity to work with sociality and communication to produce the kinds of
social circumstances (project teams) and shared meaning complexes (corporate culture)
that allow a flexible adaptation of the production process to the rapidly shifting demands
of a volatile market environment. There is also a growing body of literature that stresses
the connection between the mediatisation of the work process and the necessity of, and
capacity for, such immaterial, affective work, (Zuboff, 1988, Mowshowitz, 2002). To my
mind, this points to the possibility of a more general connection between the mediatisa-
ton of the social and the productivity of affect.
Arguably, Marx is not the right thinker to start with in establishing that connection.
A better point of departure is Gabriel Tarde. This long marginalised (but recently redis-
covered) sociologist pointed to the direct economic relevance of public communication.
In his Psychologie économique (Tarde, 1902), he argued that, at least for luxury goods, the
value of a commodity was partially determined by the public production of standards of
‘truth, beauty and utility’ that could serve as a measure (because such goods did not have
a place within traditional standards of value). The cognitive and affective productivity of
the public should thus be understood as an integral element to a society-wide, extended
production process by means of which the values of such goods were established. Tarde’s
argument was that the public could serve as such a productive subject because it was not
directly tied into the fixed codes of traditional social circles. Rather, the public mobilised
individuals across geographical and cultural boundaries in a sort of transversal network-
ing of minds. This autonomy of the public allowed it to produce ideas that could not
emerge elsewhere. In short, the productivity of the public rested on its particular ability
to fantasise, and likewise construct virtual alternatives to the actual.
Indeed such a relation between the mediatisation of public communication and the
enhanced powers of fantasy has stood at the core of critical receptions of new media tech-
nologies for a long time. An enhanced capacity for fantasy has been perceived as the flip-
side to the new capacity for rational argument that has commonly been attributed to the
emergence of the modern public. One of the central preoccupations of early social theo-
rists was that the new mass media would create excessive powers of imagination. People
would imagine situations that they simply could not realise, or situations which realisa-
tion would severely disrupt the established order of things. Gustave LeBon (1896[1991]),
Scipio Sighele (1901) and later Ortega y Gasset’s (1932) preoccupations with the disrup-
tive effects of the mass mind are examples of the second attitude (as are instances of press
censorship and the eighteenth century suppression of coffee houses). Emile Durkheim’s
(1897[1966]) concept of ‘anomie’ is an example of the first attitude. He argued that the
greatly enhanced powers of the imagination that characterize modernity risk propelling
the individual’s plans and prospects beyond what is realistically possible or socially per-
missible. Divorced men, Durkheim argued, risk becoming anomic because, beyond the
limits of marriage, they are now free to imagine a sexual life too fantastic to be realised. It
is telling that Durkheim choose love and sex, or to use a common term , ‘the erotic’ as an
example of the anomic dangers of the modern, mediatised intellect. As Lynn Hunt (1993)
among others have argued, the mediatisation of erotic fantasy, from the early publications
of libertine thinkers like the Marquis de Sade onward, there has been a powerful and
potentially destabilising force of the imagination. Sade’s imaginations of fantastic erotic
relations were deeply intertwined with fantasies of a different social and moral order.
When censorship of erotic publications began in the mid–1800s, mass literacy, cheaper
printing technologies and significantly photography, had empowered a mass capacity
to fantasise about sex and, by implication, about ‘a new standard for sexual difference’
(O’Toole, 1998). Female erotic fantasies have been feared to have equally disruptive re-
sults. In fascist Italy, the new erotic demeanour of young urban girls, who modelled their
behaviour on Hollywood films and romantic stories in new, American-style women’s
magazines, was perceived to have dangerous consequences for established gender roles
as well as for female fertility (de Grazia, 1992). In India in the 1950s, newspapers and
cinema were major driving forces behind the emergence of non-traditional attitudes to
love and marriage (Gist, 1953). In the 1950s, sociologists Francesco Alberoni and Guido
Baglioni (1965) argued that the new ‘urban culture’ spread by television had made girls
in Southern Italy refuse to marry peasant men. This they claimed was a major push fac-
tor behind migrations. In short, the erotic has historically proven to be an important ex-
ample of how the media can enhance the capacity to imagine social relations, and how
this enhanced capacity can subsequently have real, transformative effects.
Indeed, it is telling that according to Thomas Laqueur’s history of masturbation, the
real dangers of the ‘solitary vice’ were not so much physical as they were social. He shows
how enlightenment thinkers form Voltaire and Rosseau to Kant worried about masturba-
tion primarily because it risked deviating psychic energy away from the moral project of
the social towards the individualistic pursuit of fantasy. ‘Autoerotic sexuality was at odds
with social and moral life as it ought to be lived,’ it risked making the subject ‘hopelessly
enslaved to himself’ (Laqueur, 2003:42). This perspective on masturbation as an asocial
or even anti-social danger prevails until the 1970s, when masturbation begins to be taken
up by the feminist movement. The right to control one’s own fantasy now becomes some-
thing to fight for and fight with. The possibility to imagine alternative forms of sexual rela-
tions becomes a political tool. Finally in the 1990s, masturbation becomes an important
74 C’Lick Me
business. Through the diffusion of the Internet, masturbatory fantasies could be shared,
collectively produced and augmented by a booming Internet porn industry, to ultimately
feed into an equally successful industry for the manufacture of various props and tools. In
true Tardian fashion, the explosion of Internet smut served to make companies like Doc
Johnson, the largest sex toy manufacturer in the US, go from a turn-over of $ 8 million in
1990 to $ 45 million in 2000, or Beate Ushe, their German equivalent, to increase sales
by 50 per cent between 1999 and 2000 (Laqueur, 2003:78 — not to speak of the turn-over
of the actual porn business itself, cf. Cronin& Davenport, 2001, Lane, 2000). It is telling
that as the Internet realises the hidden potential of the masturbatory economy, fantasies
become interactive. True, a lot of online porn sites are about the simple provision of con-
tent. But, the growing trend is to provide spaces for interaction be this a blog, an interac-
tive strip-tease, or biographical information on models that makes possible identification
and an intimacy that extends beyond the strictly carnal. This is particularly evident in
new forms of amateur pornography, where users are invited to follow the models around
as they ‘masturbate and water the plants and walk the dog and take college classes’ thus
approximating a form of consumption that builds on ‘the abolition of the spectacular in
favour of other models of relationality’ (Pattersson, 2004:112, 119, cf. McNair, 1998).
This interactivity has been pushed yet another step by the emergence of blogging. There
are at present blogs for most erotic specialities, that combine postings, fiction and other
forms of ‘user-produced’ content with links to commercial and non-commercial content
sites. Some commercial ventures, like Nerve.com, has realised the potential in this en-
hanced interactivity: constituting itself as a platform that links different users and their
different activities (bloging, dating, producing fiction, posting photos) into a community
which is not only highly educated but also actively involved in their topics of interest (‘all
things smart, sexy and culturally important and entertaining’). Advertisers are invited to
weave their messages into the environment of the site, to place their products as part of
the context within which communication unfolds.
Conclusion: The FetishBrand

Sites like Nerve.com are thus an excellent example of the tendency to put to work the
capacity for interactive fantasising that computer-mediated communication promotes.
It utilises the dual capacity of network information technologies to function both as a
means for enhancing desire and as a means for channelling and managing it. Indeed,
in the absence of old Fordist institutions (like the family, the state and the party), desire
tends to be directly organised by media circuits. This way, value and profits come to de-
pend, as Daniel Dieuaide (2006) argues, on the ability to control such flows of desire.
The productive power of capital becomes an organising capacity that extends far outside
the individual firm. This is particularly clear in the diminishing boundaries between on-
line porn and real life sexuality. One no longer simply produces a pornographic film.
One invests in a particular fetish ‘scene’ that comprises online content, blogs, spaces in
SecondLife and communities on MySpace, and importantly, a lived ‘scene’ with clubs,
bars, shops and professionals, where the particular form of desire is lived out. This way
the hyper-reality of porn — with its streamlined fashions and standardised practices — is

incarnated in the ethically significant, affective reality of real life: porn becomes sex. In-
deed, in this way the economy of fetishism profoundly resembles that of the brand, the
perhaps paradigmatic capitalist institution of the information economy (cf. Arvidsson,
2006). The brand (perhaps the original fetish, pace Marx) also accumulates value by
pre-structuring and programming circuits of desire. Like the commercial fetish it does
not command the desire of the user, but empowers it in a particular way: want a pair
of sneakers? These are the ways you can be with them and relate to what you do with
them. Feel like S/M, these are the costumes, whips and scenarios… This form of power
is distinctive, as Žižek(1999) suggested, it says not ‘You Must!’ but ‘You May!’ It is ulti-
mately based on the fusion of media and life, and the plasticity that this entails.
References
Alberoni, F. and Baglioni, C. (1965) L’integrazione del immigrato nella società
industriale, Bologna, Il Mulino.
Andrejevic, M. (2003), Reality TV. The Work of Being Watched, Lanham (Md);
Rowman, Littlefield.
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Arvidsson, A. (2006) Brands. Meaning and Value in Media Culture, London, Rout-
ledge.
Cronin, B. and E. Davenport (2001) ‘E-rogenous Zones: Positioning Pornography in the

Digital Economy’ in The Information Society, 17(1) pp. 33-48.
de Grazia, V. (1992) How Fascism Ruled Women, Berkeley, University of California Press.
Dieuaide, D. (2006), ‘Diffusione delle TIC, cambiamento dell’organizzazione e svilup-

po dei mercati borsistici,’ Vercellone, C. (a cura di)
Capitalismo Cognitivo, Roma, Manifestolibri.
Durkheim, E. (1897[1966]) Suicide, Glencoe (Ill.), The Free Press.
Dal Lago, A. and Quadrelli, E. (2003) La città e le ombre. Crimini, criminali, cittadini,
Milan, Feltrinelli.
Gist, N.P. (1953) ‘Mate selection and mass communication in India’ Public Opinion
Quarterly, 17 pp. 481-495.
Gorz, A. (1982) Farewell to the Working Class, London, Pluto.

76 C’Lick Me
Habermas, J. (1984, 1987) The Theory of Communicative Action (vols. I & II),
Boston, Beacon.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2004) Multitude, London, Penguin.
Hunt, L. (1993) The Invention of Pornography. Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity,
Cambridge (Mass.) MIT Press.
Lane, F. (2000) Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age,
London, Routledge.
Laqueur, T. (2003) Solitary Sex. A Cultural History of Masturbation, New York, Zone
Books.
Le Bon, G. (1896[1991]) Psychologie des foules, Paris, Presses universitaires de France.
McNair, B. (1996) Mediated Sex. Pornography and Postmodern Culture,

London, Arnold.
Miranda, J. (1998) ‘The Performance of Consumption and Production,’ Social Text,

54(10) pp. 25-61.
Mowshowitz, A. (2002) Virtual Organization. Towards a Theory of Societal Transforma-

tion Stimulated by Information Technologies, Westport (CT), Quorum Books.
Ortega y Gasset, J. (1932) The Revolt of the Masses, New York, Norton.
O’Toole, L. (1998) Pornocopia.Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire, London, Serpents Tail.
Patterson, Z. (2004) ‘Going online. Consuming pornography in the digital era’, ed. L.
Williams, Porn Studies, Durham (NC): Duke University Press, pp.22-56.
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Sighele, S. (1901) La foule criminelle, essai de psychologie collective, Paris, Alcan.

77
The Naked Truth:

Internet Eroticism and The Search
Manuel Bonik and Andreas Schaale
Erotic/pornographic sites (from now on: X-sites1) are among the most popular on the
Internet and form one of its constitutive moments. Worldwide there are, depend-
ing on the estimation, between two and ten million of them. They signify a phenom-
enon of important dimensions, whose economic, societal and cultural consequences
are hardly surveyable, but that surely are and will become gigantic. At the same time,
old taboos concerning sexuality are evidently active even under cyber-relations: of-
fline, the theme ‘eroticism on the Internet’ is largely ignored and with traditional so-
cio-economic surveys such as Kinsey2 one only obtains highly distorted results. In the
following article, we choose a different, more useful approach, as we will analyse the
interrelations between search machines and X-sites; in particular, we evaluate the re-
quests made at various, usually German, search machines. There are neither taboos nor
interview-effects here, but simply the naked truth concerning the desires of the user.
1. The Search
The search forms an elementary human function, and in all likelihood plays a role in
many universes. Like many elementary human functions it can be formalised: besides
the human (“Where are my glasses?”), the search has, in the last decades, been notice-
ably expressed in software; maybe most prominently so in the UNIX-command ctrl F (=
find), even though that does relate only to the search within a document. With the In-
ternet emerged the so-called search machines, necessary software to retain an overview
within the flow of netdocuments, and to find just those documents related to the theme
one is actually searching for. There are currently attempts underway to develop search
mechanisms that directly search for images, but for the time being they are still based
78 C’Lick Me
on text as it can be found on HTML-, DOC-, PDF- and other pages as well as in their
Metatags. From this has developed in the last years a full-blown search-machine-indus-
try,3 which is currently most prominently represented in the public sphere by the name
and business of Google. Others include: AltaVista, Look Smart, Inktomi, Infoseek and
Fireball. Even though Google currently seems to possess almost a monopoly4 in the
public perception, search machines are also subjected to fashions. Yesterday it was Alta-
Vista, today it is Google or Yahoo, and tomorrow another search machine might be the
new star for whatever reason. Even Microsoft has recently entered this business with its
MSN Search and clearly possesses the capabilities to increase its market share in this
field. In the area of open-source, Nutch5 can be mentioned.
1.1. SEARCH TECHNOLOGY APPLICATIONS

Whenever the search is mentioned, most people will probably think of search machines
such as Google or Yahoo. Yet, search machines are not the only field in which search
technology6 is being used; one need only think of the fact that some of the most popular
and successful websites are based on search technology, such as Amazon, EBay, iTunes
or the dating-site, Adult Friend Finder. Many websites incorporate their own search
masks (‘sitesearch’) and on the intranet of businesses, for example, there are numerous
search-applications in relation to databases and content-management-systems.7
On the other private side of applications, there are now various software applica-
tions that perform a ‘Desktop Search,’ the search on your own computer(s). Desktop
search returns home to a certain extent the search technology of the Internet and it may
be expected that it will also transform the dealings with information there: no longer is
there any need to save data within hierarchical and sensible structures, instead one can
leave data at arbitrary locations on the computer and crawl through these data when-
ever needed. It must be said, however, that we do not necessarily rate the applications of
Google and Yahoo among the best8 and in relation to desktop search we would currently
advise Copernic.9
1.2 How Do Search Machines Function?

Whenever starting a request in a search machine, many people probably believe that
by doing so they trigger a search of the complete intended database, for example the
Internet. That is not the case, or at least not in real-time to the actual request. In prin-
ciple, such (almost) real-time requests are possible, but usually reserved for those tech-
nologies that are much more elaborate and expensive than popular applications such as
Google. In practice, search machines do search the Internet and send bots, spiders and
other agents to crawl through the databases of sites, but they do so at various rhythms,
and for various reasons, and therefore not in real-time. With the information collected
by these agents, indices are built that contain the information of/about the visited sites
in condensed form, simplified and searchable according to algorithm. These indices are
saved on the servers of the respective search machines which then make the connection
with the site containing the referenced information (hopefully still there since the last
spider-visit). Currently (August 2005), the index of Google contains approximately 11.3
billion documents; Yahoo almost twice as many – 20.8 billion documents – of which,
according to Yahoo, more than 1.6 billion are images and more than fifty million are
audio and video-data.
The user’s search request is decisive for determining which links appear on top of the
list of results. One can search for ‘cuckoo clocks,’ ‘tits’ or ‘images with blue dildos, but
without men,’ and receive a list that might contain a few million results. Only a minority
of users even takes a look at the second page of the list — that which is not on the first page
does not exist for them on the Internet. In this regard, ranking-methods that determine
the rank of a site on these lists are hugely important. Various criteria have been developed
to measure the relevance of a site, such as the pagerank-method of Google or the vox
populi-algorithm.10 Traditional ranking-methods function on a strictly algorithmic basis
and measure, for example, the frequency of keywords on websites or the amount of links
from acknowledged, ‘serious’ websites to the concerned site. On webcatalogues, on the
other hand, sites can be recommended for inclusion in the list and it is a (human) edito-
rial staff that checks these recommendations by hand.11 Finally, there are commercially
oriented methods, where positions in the list can be bought, and all possible mixtures
between these methods.12
The sale of positions on the list of results is of vital importance to the business model of
Google — it is here that advertising revenues are earned. Many struggles are therefore rag-
ing on the Internet for these positions: under the keyword of ‘search-optimisation’ (legal
and illegal) ways are sought to improve the position of websites in the lists. Among the il-
legal methods one can count ‘linkfarming’ or ‘Google Bombing,’ and considerable invest-
ments are made in the development of search algorithms etc. to counter these methods.
1.3 RECENT Developments

Lately, since the 2004, stock exchange public offering of Google has a wider public
been shown how important search machines and search technologies actually are.
‘Googling’ has in many countries become part of colloquial language. Meanwhile, the
search-market is very dynamic and heavily fought over. In June 2005, according to the
press agency AP as well as Spiegel Online, the market share of Google was 36,9 percent,
and before Yahoo with 30,4 percent, and now the newly launched search of Microsoft,
MSN Search,13 is doing well in business.
Google is so successful that its actual core business, the search for texts, hardly prom-
ises any further growth. This is why Google (and its competitors) are currently continu-
ally developing new segments of business, such as the already mentioned desktop-search,
the library-full-text search Google Library, or most recently, the satellite-image-software,
Google Earth, which enables zoom-travels across a virtual globe.
Furthermore, image-, audio- and video-data increasingly come in the search ma-
chines’ field of vision. At the end of August, Yahoo launched a special audio-search that
also includes online music stores and enables price comparisons of titles. Of course,
this — especially the search for music — is momentarily a particularly sensitive issue; one
80 C’Lick Me
need only recall Napster and, of course, more topically with a smirk, the panic reactions
of western music-industries when it comes to the Russian search machine allofmp3.com.
2. Eroticism on the Internet
2.1 Cultural-Historical Background

Pornography has, as is well known, not emerged with the Internet, but the Internet has
merely increased its spread and, as one may suspect, its effect. Images of naked bodies
are part of ancient statements of human culture. One need only mention here the Ve-
nus of Willendorf (ca. 25.000 BC) or the frescos of Pompeii.
In the history of art, the nude, in particular the female nude, has played an important
role from the very beginning, and up to this day: merely taking a look at the yearly survey
of the art market on the most heavily dealt works of the year in the Frankfurter Allgemei-
ne Zeitung,14 shows that a substantial amount of these are female nudes. Pornography as
an autonomous genre came into being at the latest with the emergence of photography
around the mid-nineteenth century, which created new possibilities of real-time-portray-
al; its multiplication and reproduction created new routes of distribution. A lot of people
could now see what previously had been reserved to those privileged strata that could
afford art.15 Pornography became part of popular culture, although a very special part,
since it touched upon ancient pleasures and fears and long-standing complex systems of
rules that people have constructed in the area of sex.
In similar and at the same time non-comparable ways, did the experience of Inter-
net pornography bring new quantitative and qualitative dimensions (and the other way
round)16, and this time the cultural break seems to be of an even more dramatic nature.
This is not necessarily to be judged in a negative fashion, either from a conservative-mor-
alist or a Foucauldian17 point of view. One need only think of the damage that has been
done (and in Islamic or catholic countries still is) by religious sex-controls to be grate-
ful for the contributions of X-sites as a form of education: the story of the stork will no
longer convince contemporary youth. However, one does not know how their sexuality
will develop when they are, from a tender age, only a few mouseclicks away from sexual
content of all possible qualities and thus maybe moulded by less welcome role clichés.
But to know this is not the task of this text: for one attempt to understand X-sites as a posi-
tive utopia, we refer to the Crash Conference paper “Pornographic Coding”18 of Florian
Cramer and Stewart Home.
2.2 Quantitative Assessment of X-sites

According to some estimates, more than fifty percent of Internet-traffic is generated
by pornography- and eroticism-sites (including peer to peer networks); more conserva-
tive calculations start at thirty percent (thirty percent of the top 100 keywords in Ger-
man search engines are sex related19). In a 2004 study, the firm Secure Computing20
has researched how X-sites are distributed between the various country-domains: .de21
amounted to 10,030,200 sites; second place was the United Kingdom with neverthe-
less still 8,506,800 sites. In addition to these, there are many times larger amounts of US
sites, but these are usually registered under .com22 and are therefore not encompassed
by this study. At the same time, these figures need to be reduced by considerable dimen-
sions, since only a part of these X-sites actually offer content themselves, whereas other
sites are either indexes or search-machine-sites or are fakes anyway. This last category
includes linkfarms and other types of sites that carry all sorts of searchable terms in their
text and/or metatags, but these merely serve the purpose of generating traffic and do not
actually offer content or links to content. Since such spam-sites are particularly active
within the field of eroticism, it is only possible to give a very rough estimate of ‘real’ do-
mains with adult content — these might amount to anything between two and ten mil-
lion sites worldwide.
Taking a look at the ranking compiled by the Alexa ranking-system for international
websites - installable as a plug-in for your browser — one doesn’t find any X-sites on the
top of the list, but as expected sites like Yahoo.com (Alexa-rank 1), Ebay.com (8) or Mi-
crosoft (11). Even before Apple (69), however, is already ranked the dating site Adult
Friend Finder23 with an Alexa-rank of 45. Within the three-digit range X-sites are often
to be found, such as the Dutch site TheHun.com (775) or Playboy.com (866). An X-site
such as AskJolene.com all in all achieves with approximately 3.5-million search requests
per day (self-advertisement) rank number 1.953 and a large amount of the four- and
five-digit rankings are actually X-sites. This is comparable to non-X-sites such as Wash-
ingtonPost.com (207), the Süddeutsche Zeitung (sueddeutsche.de, 2.983),24 the US gov-
ernment (firstgov.gov, 6.159) or the German government (bundesregierug.de, 90.219).
Cut-up.com has a ranking of 5.032.530.25
Interesting among the X-sites is Asstr.org (Alexa-ranking 2.576), the Alt Sex Sto-
ries Test Repository, since this is not a commercial pornsite, but a real community-site.
Here there are no images, but solely stories written by community-members and offered
online for free. The asstr-archive momentarily contains around 250.000 documents.
2.3 Why are X-sites on the Internet so Successful?

Wanting to psychologise, one could argue: X-sites are in many ways immediate (sexual)
wish-fulfilments. For many, they may constitute a far-reaching — although not necessar-
ily a hundred per cent — substitution for (sexual) relations with real human beings. One
can surmise that quite some men spend their overtime in the office before the computer
screen with their hand on their very own joystick. No wonder that he feels overtired and
is not in the mood at night to gratify his real wife or girlfriend with intercourse. Maybe
X-sites have something to do with the low birth rates in the advanced industrial nations?
Or is the collapse of the New Economy connected to the sexual weakening of its man-
agers? But, all these are speculations and, seen from a more positive side, it is still better
that man masturbates than develops a lust for war.
The millions of X-sites on the Internet are available around the clock. Contrary to the
expensive porn magazines, pornography on the Internet is largely free of charge. And con-
trary to the magazines, one no longer has to visit the kiosk, the sex shop or the peep show
82 C’Lick Me
to get access to pornography; one can simply download it anonymously (whatever ‘anony-
mous’ may signify on the Internet) at home or in the office and ‘enjoy’ — and that means
without control of concrete persons toward which one ought to be ashamed. The uses range
from the mainstream-user to the Otaku, from the woman who followed the link in one of the
women’s magazines and finally would like to know what is going on there, to the pervert; to
what extent X-sites are used by two or more people together is something we can not assess.
2.4 Porn networks

Pornography constitutes, as delineated above, a large factor on the Internet and a full-
fledged industry. Its turnover can, similar to the amount of ‘real’ X-sites, only be es-
timated and this is to an important extent the case because much of the X-business
traditionally takes place behind the scenes. For the year 2004 estimates range from at
least five million to twenty or even thirty billion US dollars. Serious X-sites, those with
their own contents, offer a large part of these contents for free on pages with series com-
prised of some dozen images (galleries) or a few brief videoclips that function as teas-
ers for possible subscribers or that are simply there to generate traffic (with which one
can also earn money). Subscribers receive passwords and/or dialers and are then able to
advance to the ‘secrets’ of the site: series of longer duration or higher resolution or spe-
cial services like webcams or livechats with porn actresses/actors.26 In general, however,
subscriptions seem aimed at inexperienced Internet users,27 since an extreme amount of
pornography is available for free and often the various offers on the opening pages con-
verge with the content of the subscribers’ pages i.e., there is actually nothing ‘more’ to
see here.
‘Real’ X-sites often have a consistent aesthetic: from amateur-sites with rough vid-
eo-resolution recordings (and such an amateurish suggestion can very well be con-
sciously staged by professionals to conjure up authenticity) to high-end sites such as
Playboy. And many content providers have consequently also developed a specialisa-
tion on specific genres, such as Most Erotic Teens with soft focus photographs in the
tradition of bilitis-films or Blacks On Blondes with interracial hardcore (mostly a white
woman and one or more black men). At Captain Stabbin they’re humping on boats,
at Backseatbanger in driving cars (after offering supposedly accidental passers-by a few
dollar notes that are then also shown and the amount of which is willingly mentioned).
3. Eroticism Search
3.1 X-Search Sites

To these ‘real’ X-sites one normally gains access through specialised search machines
and webcatalogues — it is these that will concern us here in more detail. Before doing
so, it needs to be mentioned that ‘real’ X-sites have to be seen alongside vast numbers
of ‘unreal’ X-sites, i.e., contents are suggested in order to incite inexperienced users to
download expensive dialers. Something similar is aimed at by the all too known spam
mails; ‘real’ X-sites tend not to send spam. ‘Unreal’ X-search-sites offer pseudo text-links
or suggest, with images stolen from somewhere else on the net, access to contents. Usu-
ally, however, they are merely there to generate traffic and effectively do nothing more
for the user than starting pop-ups and/or leading the user to further ‘unreal’ X-search-
sites; viruses are easily spread via these kinds of sites. Finally, there are those mixed
forms of X-search-sites — in a way of ‘hybrid seriosity’ — that partly leads to real content
and partly to fake pages. Apart from that, though, there might be users for whom surfing
from fake to fake is already sufficiently satisfying.
In principle, those searching for cybersex make their way to specialised X-search-sites.
General search sites such as Google or Yahoo hardly play any role here. Although they are
for many X-searchers the first contact points, since 2004 they largely suppress the theme
(and with it regularly also those sites not meant erotically at all, such as gynaecology-
sites) and also do not admit any bought rankings or banner ads. That is necessary, since
otherwise they would very likely drown in pornography considering the sheer amount of
X-sites, their massive web ‘presence’ and the resulting amount of applicable keywords, as
well as the programming effort undertaken by many X-entrepreneurs to gain a high rank-
ing in search machines. Whenever firms make public the most frequent requests at peri-
odic theme-rankings, they simply lie and keep silent about ‘the naked truth.’ At google.de,
it is simply not possible to turn off the family filter, but this merely functions as a fig leaf,
since two thirds of the German requests at Google are dealt with by google.com anyway.
Insofar as results are delivered here, it usually involves links that lead to fake sites.
Among the X-search-sites one has to distinguish between those that operate sim-
ilar to traditional search machines — those that offer a search mask in which one
can start a freely formulated request28 — and X-webcatalogues that offer a search ac-
cording to fixed categories and are either based on text-links, thumbnails or both.
Here as well, there are many hybrids; for now, our concern is the X-webcatalogues.
3.2. Categories of X-Webcatalogues

On many X-sites one finds similar categories that classify the offered contents, in par-
ticular the images; some are however also specialised in videoclips, others offer in each
category the choice between the search for images or videos. Mainstream-sites typically
address a male audience and usually offer images of / with women (men mostly appear
here merely as decoration, very much in the tradition of mainstream pornmagazines).
Besides these, however, there is also an adequate amount of sites that specifically cater
to a male homosexual audience and further below we will find that mainstream-sites
only play a relatively minor role within the overall supply.
The material on offer is multifaceted; there are classifications along the lines of age
(teens, matures, grannies), hair colour (blondes, redheads), clothing (latex, bikini), prac-
tice (toys, fucks, blowjobs, groups), race (Asians, blacks, Latinos), body features (hairy/
shaved, small/large breasts), gender (gay, transvestites), etc.29 Hustler Platinum, for ex-
ample, advertises with “Pornstars, Amateurs, Teens, Grandmas, Lesbians and More!!”
Nationality is a rare criterion, although Russia and several states of the former Eastern
bloc are to some extent represented, which probably corresponds to the actual produc-
84 C’Lick Me
tion circumstances of pornography: Asian usually means Japanese and less often Thai,
Chinese or Korean; Latin stands for all South American countries, particularly Brazil,
but often also includes US sites.
Sometimes the genres converge and overlap; when a series from Hardcore becomes
a series from Blowjob or when in a dildo-session the dildo can be left out. These main-
stream categories have produced a number of technical terms that are nontheless fully
understood by millions of laymen. Thus one will rarely find within the mainstream links
to real child pornography X-sites; categories such as Lolita usually mean in all aspects
Teens and often enough the depicted real Teens are in actuality Matures (although not
Grannies). Many images that are used in advertisements for Lolita-sex have been circulat-
ing since years (on fake-sites). Search requests for ‘children’s sex’ have to be taken literally,
however – around ten percent of all requests with ‘children’ are meant sexually.
What is however so astonishing (and what gave the first impetus to write this text) is
the circumstance that beyond these few categories of the mainstream X-sites, there are
substantially more categorisations being undertaken. Pussy.org, to mention only one of
the many X-catalogues, earns its money apparently with advertisements for dating, and
carries according to its own advertisement 804.925 galleries in its database and presents
these in four hundred (!!!) different and alphabetically organised categories; each cat-
egory offers a choice between images or video. Here merely the letter B: Babe, Backseat,
Banana, Banging, Bath, Bathing, Bathroom, Bbw, Bdsm, Beach, Beads, Beauty, Beaver,
Bed, Belly, Bigcock, Bigtit, Biker, Bikini, Bimbo, Bisexual, Bitch, Biting, Bizarre, Black,
Blindfolded, Blonde, Blowjob, Bondage, Boobs, Boots, Booty, Boss, Bottle, Bound, Boys,
Braces, Brazilian, Bride, British, Brunette, Brutal, Bukkake, Business, Busty, Butt, Butt-
fucking, Butthole, Buttplug.
One notices that a (usually illegal or in any case dire) category such as Beasts (sex
with animals) doesn’t show up at all. After clicking one of those categories, one receives
(completely analogous to Google), a list with short descriptive texts, which contain
the requested keyword. The descriptions are delivered by the content-providers, as for
example “Blonde young bitch fucking a bottle”; one thus gains access to this specific
gallery through several keywords and it is therefore able to ‘satisfy’ more than one pref-
erence. A category such as Bizarre isn’t defined in any clear-cut fashion, but can con-
tain punkgirls as well as groupsex with whatever abstruse masks. It is clear that some of
these categories are synonyms, Boobs and Tits for example; most of them are not how-
ever (leaving aside the fact for the moment that Tits are also offered in various sizes).
3.3 Target Groups

It can be assumed that the various porn categories have developed in the way they did
and that by doing so they reflect to some extent the wishes of the users. Meanwhile, as we
have established, the categories are varied and in that respect one also has to assume a
variety of users. Even the mainstream can already offer anything from twenty to over one
hundred categories; the underground many more. This variety is not only astonishing,
but from a quantitative perspective also overwhelming. And those searching for ‘normal’
mainstream eroticism are more likely to be part of a minority: it is striking that the search
is not just for the horny girl next door or blonde Playboy-beauties, but that the extremely
specialised sites have to be seen alongside an equally specialised spectrum of users.
Here, the search is quite obviously for what ephemeral acquaintances or ‘normal’
(love) relationships between two people do not have on offer: fetish-sex, sex with ani-
mals etc. The majority of users searches for such specialised sites, only ten percent for
‘normal’ sex. No theme is remote enough, no fetish too exotic, for it not to be searched
and it doesn’t matter if one is dealing with Bukkake (apparently a Japanese invention,
in which a number of men, either with preceding gangbang or merely after jerking off
in groups drop their sperm on (usually) the face of (usually) a woman30) or boxing (rub-
ber-) nuns. During talks among men — at least this has happened to one of the authors
a number of times — if they even address the topic of Internet-sex at all, the site Fucking
Machines is sometimes discussed, an X-site where women are being fucked by various
dildo-reinforced machines. On Vulis-Archives one can see women in various sports dis-
ciplines, basketball or swimming for example, in any case nude; on the ‘alternative’ X-
site IShotMyself.com (female) models take photos of themselves; it is not very easy even
to imagine an erotic category aka fetish for which there is not one specialised website.
3.4 Full-X-Search
That what is not given away by the categories of the X-webcatalogues has to be provided
in another manner. The variety of the (verifiable) X-categories is confronted with the
open (and endless) variety of freely formulated requests of the users. The categories of
sexsites are varied, but do not exactly reflect the interests of the users, since there are
simply too many and too many specific fetishes for all of them to be conceived by edi-
tors of a webcatalogue. That does not mean, however, that there are no X-sites that cater
to these highly individualised wishes, sometimes merely by accident, sometimes actu-
ally by specialisation, sometimes even in surprisingly high differentiation.
In pure webcatalogues, the searchers have to adhere to the existing categories. If
their special fetish isn’t there, they might click on a different category that is similar to
the one wished for. Statistics of webcatalogues can therefore only be the statistics of
norms, which they themselves have — based on the frequency of requests — constructed.
On the one hand, a search within search masks freely formulated requests, and on the
other, shows the actual wishes and its distribution. Contrary to studies such as those of
Kinsey — without wanting to denigrate its achievements — these kinds of studies do not
have to deal with any kind of interview-effects. Conventional socio-empirical studies have
to restrict themselves to the questioning of several hundred or thousand persons and of-
ten enough produce artefacts.31 With searches one is often dealing with several million
of requesters and even when one does not really know if behind a specific IP there is a
human or a bot, a female or male or some other ‘gender,’ one thing is clear: here no one
is lying, here the truth is naked.
One example would be the data provided by the Keyword Datenbank,32 where the
goal is to determine which keywords are requested most often. One can find here (al-
86 C’Lick Me
though not for free, but only after payment) the data of two hundred million requests of
various (German) search machines33 and months. On a yearly regular basis, erotically
connotated keywords, besides some more obvious candidates such as ‘Google’ or ‘Aldi’,34
are part of the front-runners.
On an average day, in this instance, 3 April 2005, the Keyword Datenbank registers
no less than 1.798.979 requests that are clearly aimed at X-sites. They can be divided
into about 2500 different requests that were made at least ten times a day. Lonely leader
among these keywords is, with almost 300.000 requests, ‘Erotik’ (‘eroticism’ or ‘erotic’),
followed by ‘sex’ (142.251), ‘Sex Bilder’ (‘sex images,’ 64.741) and once again ‘erotic’
(54.726); all this is hardly anything surprising. It becomes more interesting at ranking
eight with ‘FKK,’ in other words ‘Freikörperkultur’,35 since such a request tends to be
made not by friends of nature that want to know where they can find a nude beach, but
more genre-specifically from people who (also) want to see nude children. Rank ten is
taken by ‘bondage’ (28.580). On eleven one finds ‘erotische Geschichten’ (‘erotic stories,’
24.278), on twenty ‘Sexgeschichten’ (‘sex stories,’ 12.903), in other words, literature. Po-
sition number fifteen goes to ‘Swinger’ (19.753), position nineteen to ‘Sexkontakte’ (‘sex
contacts,’ 13.327), twenty-one to ‘Swingerclub’ (12.520),35 clearly attempts to reach ac-
tual sex through virtual sex. The list goes on and on — one can also mention ‘Kamasutra’
on rank twenty-six (9.436), ‘gaychat’ (28/8.595) and ‘homo.de’ (30/7.980), ‘Parkplatzsex’
(‘car-park sex,’ 70/3.207), ‘Hängetitten’ (‘soggy tits,’ 113/1.813) and ‘Omasex’ (‘granny
sex,’ 181/1.044), ‘animalsex’ (137/1.405), ‘Inzestgeschichten’ (‘incest stories,’ 139/1.404),
‘Haarfetisch’ (‘hair fetish,’ 207/871), ‘Gummipuppen’ (‘rubber dolls’ 216/816), ‘Titten-
grabscher’ (‘tits grabber,’ 227/783), ‘Kinderporno’ (‘child pornography,’ 299/623), ‘hors-
esex’ (309/614), ‘deutsche Stars nackt’ (‘German celebrities nude,’ 320/599), ‘Windelsex’
(‘diaper sex,’ 409/448), ‘Britney Spears nackt’ (‘Britney Spears nude,’ 436/413).
These are, as already mentioned, merely the requests on one day. Many requests aim
at similar directions or might differ only by one letter or by the fact that they are written as
either one or two words. A clearer picture emerges when they are rated: eight percent of the
requesters are interested in BDSM/Toy Sex, in other words, areas that go beyond the so-
called ‘Housewives-sex.’ Seven percent is searching for homosexual X-sites, contacts or loca-
tions. Two percent searches for paedophilic or incest-contents, one percent for sodomistic.
Conclusion
Our figures would be even more exceptional if one could compare them with official
statistics. A comparison, however, is not possible since these statistics are fraught with
a high amount of estimations and are therefore basically unusable.36 We therefore dare
to assert that these numbers of search statistics are the first that are actually resilient and
convincing — this is the ‘naked’ truth.
Translation: Bas van Heur

Notes
1 In principle, blogs, chats, MUDs, newsgroups, UMTS-applications etc. can be part
of this category, but these will not be discussed in this article.
2 That said, even Kinsey already noticed that the majority of sex is experienced
alone. Cf.: http://www.jackinworld.com/library/articles/kinsey.html.
3 See for example http://www.webpronews.com.
4 That is, at least in the West. In Russia, for example, Google hardly plays a role.
5 http://lucene.apache.org/nutch.
6 Quite a good, although not really well-edited overview of the informatics’ concepts
of search machines is offered by: Michael Glöggler, Suchmachinen im Internet:
Funktionsweisen, Rankingmethoden, Top-Positionen, 2nd Revised Edition, Berlin,
Heidelberg, etc.: Springer-Verlag, 2005.
7 See for example http://www.intranetsuche.de.
8 The search is, seen from a mathematical viewpoint, still a relatively young field
that will, as might be expected, further develop; the question of the ‘relevance’ of
documents itself will see quite some formalisations. And despite its popularity, the
algorithms of Google are by no means the non plus ultra of development. Those
interested could take a more critical look at his or her search results and pay atten-
tion to how many of x-thousand results are plain doubles.
9 www.copernic.com.
10 www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22301.html.
11 Reference is made to Jane’s Guide (www.janesguide.com) where X-sites – and
besides X-sites even erotic poetry and fiction, photo books, artists’ pages and more
- are even discussed as well as ranked by the editorial team.
12 See for example www.janesguide.com.
13 http://search.msn.com.
14 The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is the major conservative newspaper within
Germany.
15 Reference can be made, for topical reasons, to the exhibition ‘Spirit’ of Rémy Mar-
kowitsch; for example as part of the collection Coninx in Zurich, of which a con-
siderable part belongs to appropriate genres: female nude, atelier-scene, nude with
long hair, jeune femme devant son lit, boy at brook, nymphes au bord de l’eau etc.
See: http://coninx-museum.ch. Also cf. chapter 3.2.
16 Interestingly enough there is very little cultural / technological-historical research
on the question of to what extent pornography has supported the emergence and
spread of new mediatechnologies. For photography it is obvious that without por-
nography it would not have become the historic media-power that it now is in a
similar manner; and as many other media the Internet would not exist in its current
form without pornography.
17 A reference that one probably hardly needs to mention among the readers of cut.
up.media.magazine: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction,
New York: Pantheon, 1978.
88 C’Lick Me
18 http://cramer.Netzliteratur.Net/writings/pornography/london-2005/
pornographic-coding.html.
19 www.keyword-datenbank.de.
20 www.securecomputing.com.
21 Counted are also artistic sites such as www.fotoshop.de. But, naturally, the name of
national top-domain does not say anything about the actual location of the server.
22 To the commercial sites also belongs de hippie-porn-site www.fuckforforest.com,
whose operators support projects in favour of rain forests. Greenpeace, however,
has rejected to accept money from them.
23 www.adultfriendfinder.com. There are quite a number of X-sites that merely seem to
exist to generate traffic for this dating-site. See for example: www.sleazydream.com.
24 The Süddeutsche Zeitung is another major and more liberal German newspaper.
25 All data are from 29 August 2005.
26 To what extent subscriptions play a role at illegal sites (child pornography) and what
kind of services are offered there is something we cannot and do not want to assess.
27 And it is only to these users that illegal dialers might constitute a problem.
28 See for example www.allthesmut.com.
29 In this list, that so strangely recalls the divisions into minority-labels, the only things
missing seem to be disabilities and religions; for all that, there are the categories
‘dwarfs’ and ‘gothic.’
30 Ejaculations in the face or at the least on the skin of the partner are part of the stan-
dard repertoire of pornography. In contrast to actual sex this is the only way for im-
ages to ‘proof’ that the man has actually had an orgasm.
31 Despite the strange title still worth reading in regard to all deliberate and unde-
liberate statistics-falsifications: Hans-Peter Beck-Bornholdt and Hans-Hermann
Dubben, Der Hund, der Eier Legt – Erkennen von Fehlinformationen durch
Querdenken, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997.
32 www.keyword-datenbank.de.
33 One can assume that the search of the largest German site T-Online (www.t-on-
line.de) occupies a large share here. That site also has a special eroticism-search
including traffic-numbers, which are very high. One of the reasons for this might
be that, as already mentioned, Google is no longer useful in this area.
34 Aldi is the largest discounter/supermarket in Germany.
35 Freikörperkultur and its abbreviation FKK are the German words for nudism and
its associated lifestyle.
36 Cf. Michael Schetske, “Internetkriminalität: Daten und Diskurse, Strukturen und
Konsequenzen,” www.creative-network-factory.de/cybertheorie/cyberpapers/Texte/
Internetkriminalitaet.html.
89
Netporn, Sexuality and the Politics of Disability:

A Catalyst for Access, Inclusion and Acceptance?
Tim Noonan
People with disability are just that, people. People who happen to have differing capabili-
ties and limitations. Anything which applies to people, in general, also applies to people
with disability. So, since many people in the broader community choose to access, con-
sume and participate in netporn, it follows that many people with disability (being a sub-
set of the community) also wish to be afforded the same opportunities.
There are very few treatments of netporn that recognise the specific characteristics,
issues, and cultures of Internet users with disabilities. Nevertheless, there is a significant
impact that netporn is having on people with disability, including issues of access, inclu-
sion, consumption and changing social attitudes towards both disability and sexuality.
In a chapter describing the effects of pornography on attitudes towards sexuality,
McKee concludes: “For many Australians it seems that pornography has helped their
‘participation in society’ by raising self-esteem, confirming identity and confidence, and
building communities” (2005:130). People with disabilities were not the subject of this
study, but it seems logical to suggest that similar positive outcomes would be reported by
disabled consumers of pornographic material.
Classical paper-based porn formats can be very difficult or downright impossible for
many people with disability to access independently. For this reason, access to online
porn resources is even more crucial and significant for people with disability, often being
THE ONLY — rather than ONE of SEVERAL options for consumption and participa-
tion. For online access to information to be viable, awareness of the specific access needs
and options for people with disability by netporn producers and designers is paramount,
but regularly overlooked.
90 C’Lick Me
Historically, people with disability have been largely sheltered from all manner of
sexual knowledge, material and even opportunities for healthy socio-sexual expression
and engagements. Content which may be considered as very mildly erotic by a person
who has had longer-term access to a rich range of sexual content, could in fact be power-
fully exciting and arousing for another, less exposed person. Accordingly, I don’t try to
categorise or label netporn content in terms of art, erotica or porn, my focus is on equiva-
lent levels of access for all across the gamut of sexual material from sex information and
sexuality awareness, through to erotica and what might be termed hard porn.
This focus is supported at points in the article by anecdotal experiences from peo-
ple with various disabilities and their challenges and successes with online erotic/por-
nographic consumption/engagements. The anecdotal data were gathered from various
discussions and email correspondence I’ve had with a variety of people with disability,
including some first-hand experiences of my own as a blind person. They throw light on
various elements of people’s personal sexual lives, their sexual desires and experiences,
the channels they use for accessing and consuming content, and their subjective repor-
ting of the impact of such technologies in their day-to-day lives. All case study references,
including mine are anonymized, but all reflect real-life experiences and responses of the
people who have so generously shared their personal experiences.
A variety of different disabilities are covered, but the greater focus is on netporn and
people who are blind or vision impaired. One reason for this is because I believe that
insufficient justice is given to the various non-visual aspects of porn and netporn, and
certainly compared with physical disability, too little information exists which explores
issues of blindness and sexuality. Finally, I feel it’s particularly appropriate to write about
material with which I have direct experience, rather than predominantly recycling exi-
sting theoretical concepts which exist elsewhere.
Disability and Impairment- Modern Disability Theory1

Disability has largely been thought of as a deficient or terrible loss. The biomedical
model of disability revolves around an image of people with disabilities as having bod-
ies that need to be cured, fixed or at least treated and rehabilitated by expert and profes-
sional efforts of medical and health professionals, who — though they themselves usually
do not have a disability — all-too-often believe they ‘know best.’ While the charitable ap-
proach to disability is gradually changing, it still is quite powerful, more often than not
positioning people with disabilities as individuals deserving of pity, who should be as-
sisted by caring, well-intentioned benefactors.
More contemporary approaches to disability significantly challenge these dominant
and dominating classical understandings. Informed by the movement of people with di-
sabilities that has arisen since the 1970s, disability is considered a socio-political process.
This understanding of disability draws upon the ideas and work of what has been variou-
sly called ‘new’ or ‘critical’ disability studies. The central tenet of these studies is to radi-
cally call into question the fixed idea of disability and its location in ‘deviant,’ disabled
individuals. In the British disability movement, activists and scholars such as sociologists
have famously proposed a binary opposition between ‘impairment’ and ‘disability.’ They
suggest that impairment is the material, bodily dimension: the ‘objective’ sensory condi-
tion of blindness, for instance — as opposed to disability, which is what society makes of
vision impairment.
The proponents of the social model point out that many of the difficulties and bar-
riers people face are people-made and socially constructed. For example, if information
technology is not designed with the desires and capabilities of people with disabilities
in mind, then it can be disabling. Disability does not reside with, nor is not the fault of
the person with disability; it is something brought about by an inequitable and even op-
pressive and careless set of social relations. This perspective is documented in a study
entitled Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media (Goggin
and Newell 2003). The study looks at how, time and time again, much vaunted ‘new’
technology is needlessly inaccessible to people with disabilities. The social model has
been critiqued by a range of theorists who have pointed out the shifting and complex
relationships between body and society, matter and idea, nature and culture that are not
well explained by a fastidious adherence to this disability/impairment couplet (Corker
and Shakespeare 2002).
Disability and Sexuality

There is a small, but growing body of literature examining disability and sexuality issues.
This subject, with a focus on sexual access for people with disability, is explored in the
2002 fall issue of Disability Studies Quarterly. It is interesting to note that the focus for
requested submissions was largely on issues such as facilitated sex, sexual surrogacy, sex
work and the access opportunities of those disabled people residing in institutions and
more structured living environments. Sensory disabilities (such as blindness and deaf-
ness) and access to online information were not strongly reflected in the journal.
The introduction of the Quarterly explains the problem well: “Obstacles interfering
with access to sexual expression and sexual relationships are often quite similar to tho-
se barriers faced in attempting to integrate into the majority society. That is, attitudinal
constraints, lack of monetary and/or programmatic access to personal assistance services,
physical barriers, and communication issues and transportation difficulties can all contri-
bute towards the prevention of full expression of sexuality. Unique to sexuality, however,
are the cultural meanings of sexual attractiveness and desirability, which often combine
with other barriers to compound the problem of sexual access for disabled people. By
sexual access we do not mean access to physical intimacy per se. Rather, we mean access
to the psychological, social and cultural contexts and supports that acknowledge, nurture
and promote sexuality in general or disabled people’s sexuality specifically” (Shuttlewor-
th and Mona 2002).
In a keynote closing speech written for the Queerness and Disability Conference
2002, Eli Clare says: “On my bookshelves, you can find Best Transgender Erotica, Bea-
rotica, and Zaftig: Well Rounded erotica, all fiercely asserting the sexuality of people
whose sexualities have been marginalised. And now it’s time for queer crips to join this
92 C’Lick Me
line up, time for tantalizing tales about queer crip sex. And if we don’t write them, then
who will?” (Clare 2002)
Google searches on the Internet glean a growing variety of educational materials and
resources relating to disability and sexuality, ranging from handbooks on “Safeguarding
People who use Augmentative and Alternative Communication” (for example those peo-
ple using speech synthesizers to speak, as does Stephen Hawking);2 to the articles found
on the Good Vibrations website which explore the what and how of sex involving people
with disabilities;3 and to dating sites such as lovebyrd.com: “For disables singlesLovebyrd.
com is a place to meet single adult men and women who share your challenge, handicap,
disability or condition. Visit the chat room to chat with members or visit the forums to
read the discussions on love and sex — two subjects of interest to singles of any ability, as
well as more serious discussions on disability health and other topics relevant to disabled
women and men of adult age.”4
Disability, Sexuality and Technology

It has been said that for every application of technology, a sexual application is found.
“Observers say porn and technology work together so well because each meets the needs
of the other” (Arlidge 2002). It can also be said that for every netporn development,
there will be people with disability who will wish to participate in, or consume. This is
because people with disability are a sub-set of the broader community, being made of
all people. Disability (or impairment) may hinder what people with disability are able
to do with independence or privacy, but it doesn’t change the needs, wishes and desires
of this group. Whether people with disability can do so in practice is one of the core
themes explored in this article.
Accessibility of Netporn vs. Classical Porn

“The major difference between Internet and other forms of pornography (magazines,
videos and so on) is accessibility. It is no longer necessary to go in to a newsagent or
join a mailing list in order to access pornographic images” (McKee, 2005:120). McKee
is speaking of accessibility from the perspective of added convenience and timeliness.
For people with disability the term accessibility has largely to do with whether the ser-
vice can be accessed with independence. Therefore, access is one of the key issues for
people with disability. Depending on the nature of the person’s disability, access barri-
ers can take one or both of at least two forms: access to the physical (built) environment
and access to information. Access barriers in the physical environment may include
steps, things out of reach-range, narrow or confined spaces, or objects which are difficult
to manipulate e.g., buttons and controls on self-service point of sale devices, manipulat-
ing or turning the pages of a book etc.
Information access barriers are commonly experienced by people with sensory disa-
bilities – blindness or deafness and by people with intellectual disability or cognitive im-
pairments. For people who are blind or vision impaired, online developments coupled
with developments in computer access allow fuller participation. Textual information,
which would normally be rendered to the computer screen, can be converted into syn-
thetic speech, presented in large print on the display or accessed via hardware, generating
real-time braille output. Web-based services can be designed to be more (or less) acces-
sible, depending upon the conventions adopted, such as the WWW’s Web Content Ac-
cessibility Guidelines (WCAG).5
A quite enlightening but completely satirical article about the online porn site impli-
cations of the UK’s recent Disability Discrimination Act, highlights the challenge of true
accessibility of the Internet, particularly considering how it is one of the few significantly
profitable aspects of the web: “All the webmasters we spoke to remain unconvinced that
there is any technology that would allow them to make images of ‘cum-slurping sluts’
accessible to the blind.”6
Social Exclusion
People with disability may also experience increased social isolation, or lessened oppor-
tunities for diverse social engagement as well as not finding suitable opportunities for
meeting casual or longer-term sexual partners. People with disability still can be, and
certainly have been, sheltered from and have reduced exposure to sexual education and
sexual content. This may be due to their decreased independence or the ‘caring’ envi-
ronment they find themselves in, which results in reliance on others for daily activities.
Many people with disability are often treated as though they are not sexual beings.
This is a fact, not an assertion. A disability doesn’t remove an individual’s curiosity about
their own body and what it can be used for, nor does it limit imagination. Too frequently
an unbalanced power dynamic involving the carer/institution is created with the indivi-
dual who is the recipient, whether due to fears, projection of values, codes of ethical and
professional conduct, or simply ignorance. Irrespective of the reasons for greater social
exclusion and certainly acknowledging that societal attitudes do appear to be gradually
changing for the better, it’s these social and even unconscious practices which are the
issue. I strongly argue that the paradigm shift from traditional porn distribution models,
over to the openness of the Internet has the potential to be profoundly empowering, enli-
vening and satisfying for people with disability in general and particularly so for those
who are still being socially disenfranchised and protected. The Internet, circumventing
classical information gate-keepers as it does, is truly emancipating people with disabili-
ties, socially, sexually and indeed in all aspects of daily life.
Netporn has the potential to enable many groups of people with disability to consume
and engage in ways that were never possible or viable through classic porn forms. But in
order for this to be achieved, thought and consideration of the access needs of a wider ran-
ge of potential consumers — including people with disability — must become a key part of
design, implementation and marketing for all relevant technologies and services.
Interactive Online Participation

There is now considerable literature examining gender and gender representation on
the Internet: “If the Internet is a hostile environment for women, why are women one
94 C’Lick Me
of the fastest growing sectors of the population joining and participating in the Internet?
Gender issues exist in all areas of computing. However, women have devised certain
strategies in order to overcome many of the Internet’s previous barriers.”7
I would argue that similar parallels can be drawn between women and with people
with disability on the web, even though their presence may not be that directly obvious.
There are very few good estimates of the uptake of the Internet for people with disability,
but in more developed countries technology and disability is an ever-expanding industry.
Just as gender is less visible via the Internet, so too is disability. People with disability can
decide how and when to expose their personal situation and behind their computers, they
can and usually are appearing the same as everyone else. So, depending on the context
and the medium, do they opt to explicitly disclose their disability or do they opt to ‘pass’
implicitly or explicitly as a person without a disability? Just as there were many women
who via their computer assumed a male persona and vice versa, so too there are a vast
number of people with disability who, largely through a marvellously telling assumption
by others, would appear to in fact be non-disabled. In fact, while online, such people are
indeed temporarily abled!
Dorian says, “I’ve been in three significant long-term relationships, and each of them
started online. What I most liked about this kind of getting to know people was that I
could have time off from my disability, and people got to know my personality, and my val-
ues, before they got to know about my disability. It wasn’t that I hid it, but rather as is the
case with my homosexuality, I could choose when and how to reveal it. I can’t say whether
these relationships would have developed and turned into real life ones, if I had been
blind, at first contact, but I suspect that perhaps they would not have. Still, the downside
was that I had to ‘come out’ about my blindness at some point, too early and I feared they
would be scared off; too late, and they would feel inappropriately deceived! Nowadays,
I bring it up earlier and earlier, perhaps because now I have a, so I am told, more cool
photograph of myself where I don’t particularly look blind, and I guess I’m just much less
scared of rejection these days.” (Conversations with the author, August 2005).
Jen is considered to be very attractive and gets a great buzz using her webcam to have
erotic engagements with guys, not letting them know that she is almost totally blind. “I
love the excitement and challenge of bluffing the body postures and presenting body
language so well, that the guys don’t realise it. I can see just enough to have some con-
fidence I’m looking towards the camera. I think it also improves my self-confidence that
in spite of being blind, guys find me appealing, and that my disability is only a small part
of me. I’m also a bit addicted to voice chat over the computer, and it [their voice] gives
me a much better sense about the men I’m connecting with.” (Conversations with the
author, March 2002).
Jen touches on a concept of portraying oneself online as the person one would aspire
to be. In attempting to display more natural body language, mannerisms, head angle etc,
she is actually learning and practicing a more natural involvement in social activities.
Because many people with disability may have had less comfortable social experiences
when growing up, and because (if blind) they don’t have visual observation to model
from, online communication, whether dialogue through typing, voice or cameras, can
lead to increased confidence and effectiveness in social engagements online, and inevi-
tably in real life.
Dorian relates a situation in the late 1980s where he was text-chatting online with a
guy for a couple of weeks, and had noted some slightly unusual linguistic constructs in
the other’s language, calling into question whether the guy was as old as he purported to
be. “One day I asked him what kind of music he was into, only for him to say to me (a
blind guy), ‘Oh, well actually I’m deaf, I’d rather chat about what movies you are inter-
ested in?’ We met later and he thought ‘he can’t read my lips; I can’t understand a word
he is saying.’ I thought ‘God, he stinks, and ‘everyone’ knows blind people have sensi-
tive noses!’ .” (Extracted from MSN chat transcript with the author, September 2005).
Interestingly, the computer had acted to diminish and largely overcome each person’s
respective disability, and allowed an interaction to develop which could never have, and
indeed did not, work face-to-face.
Participation in text-based virtual environments like Lambda.moo allows the user to
develop an online persona in the virtual environment. That persona can truly reflect the
person, as they perceive themselves, or it can present the kind of person they would like
to be or to become. Text-based virtual reality environments are somewhat like a cross
between multi-user chat, and text-based adventure games. People who are connected
can either interact with (type messages to) others currently connected, or they can ma-
nipulate virtual objects through special commands in the virtual space. Such text-based
virtual reality environments are used for any or all of the following purposes: they can
present environments for online collaboration and learning, facilitate learning about
programming objects in the environment, for developing and sharpening social, com-
munications and writing skills. In particular, they are locations where one can meet and
engage with one or more people who may share interests. Such meetings may involve
social or technical chat, can lead to fostering romance, or—very common in some of the
environments — act as virtual venues for engaging in virtual sex (often termed netsex or
tiny sex).
To get a sense of how environments such as lambda work, as well as some perspec-
tives on virtual reality, object permanence, online addiction and ‘net sex,’ the lambda
moo transcript as saved by Colin McCalmac (Samiam on Lambda) is a good starting
point.8 For an example transcript of a net sex interaction between three members from
an online community, and an anthropological deconstruction of the interaction, see
Marshall (2003).
Cotton (his Lambda identity in the early-to-mid-1990s) writes, “I spent a ridiculous
number of hours on Lambda. I chatted, explored, and searched for virtual sex partners.
The cool thing was that on Lambda you even could have virtual clothes, and could
Emote actions, as well as just speaking. As well as making some good friends, from all
over, I also ‘virtually’ dated, snogged and got off virtually with several people in the lamb-
da community. It was pretty cool, particularly because I could follow the lead of people
more experienced with dating and courting rituals, and all the (normally visual) actions
96 C’Lick Me
were described in text. In real life, as a blind teenager, I had no romance, a bit of falter-
ing play, but none of those first base, second base third base things, necking kissing, all of
that stuff you see in the movies. Lambda was helping me regain a lost past, a past where
my disability seemed to preclude everyday social/sexual experiences. I met a couple of my
lambda friends in real life, sometime later, and was pleasantly surprised how they mostly
matched my mental image of them” (Conversation with the author, August 2005).
Over the last fifteen or so years, some blind people and people with other disabilities
have become regular users of telephone chat or so-called phone-dating services. This is
partly because of the anonymity such services offer, and more particularly for blind peo-
ple, because the human voice is a very natural medium to express themselves and through
which to read the temperament of others. Now, some of these systems are also moving
online, merging audio from PC users with existing telephone users, or offering streaming
video as well as audio. These telephone services are covered in this article both because
they are still one domain of network-based sexual engagement for people who can’t af-
ford or easily use a computer, and because they are essentially employing the ubiquitous
telephone as an interactive voice response terminal driven by significantly advanced com-
puter software to pass voice messages from user to user, in a near real-time fashion.
Emma says, “I’ve found phone lines great for me, I’ve chatted to some really interest-
ing guys, and I’ve also worked as a phone-sex girl. I loved that! They never knew I couldn’t
see, they didn’t need to, and I was a lot better than most of the other girls at knowing
exactly where the guy was up to, just from his voice and breathing. I kind of read body
language through their voice, that’s a great asset in this line of work!” (Conversations
with the author, 2004)
People with physical disabilities, who have reduced mobility, for example those who
use wheelchairs, can experience major access challenges in independently and/or pri-
vately getting to bookshops, libraries and other locations where pornographic and erotic
materials are available. In Australia, certainly, adult bookshops are secreted away often at
the top of stairs or located in areas where sidewalks are potentially less well maintained.
For this group parcels and mail are often collected by friends or family so there is less
privacy, even for mail-order options. With motor skills reduced some people find it diffi-
cult or impossible to hold a physical book, or to turn its pages. Others find inserting and
removing videocassettes can be problematic.
In the last twenty or so years, technology, and software and hardware options for
enabling people with restricted motor control to interact with such technology have
become quite well utilized. Alternatives to the computer ‘mouse’ and keyboards have
allowed many people to engage with computers independently. Netporn offerings avail-
able online have allowed this group to find and select images, streaming video, interact
with others through webcams and text/voice chat etc, privately and independently.
David uses a wheelchair and is a frequent user of telephone chat services. “I’m in a
sort of OK (real—life) relationship, but it is a bit unsatisfactory on the sexual side. Be-
cause it’s not really cheating, I like the phone lines—I like to talk to other guys about sex,
have phone sex, and fantasise about meeting up, but never have. It’s inconvenient for me
to travel places, and because of my disability on one hand, and my seriously gym-built
upper body, on the other, I am very memorable and well known around the place, so the
anonymity of online chat is the best way for me to be discrete and no one is getting hurt.
Because I never plan to really meet them, I don’t see why I need tell them that I am six
feet tall (only when out of my wheelchair). And the other thing is that it’s nice to have
some anonymity, some privacy, a break from all the endless questions about ‘how do you
do this,’ etc., which I often get” (Phone conversation with the author, 1994).
People who are Blind or who have Reduced Vision. A colleague of mine was provi-
ding computer access training assistance to a man in his thirties who had recently lost his
sight through an accident. One of the first questions he privately asked her was: “So, are
there any porn sites online for the blind?” He then told her that seeing women, intimacy,
sex and girly magazines were the things he missed and wanted most since his vision loss.
While he will not be able to see images and actions on videos, he will be able to use his
computer to access a variety of materials, formerly only available in print. Erotic stories,
online chat, dating sites and net sex will all be options he can consume, and as we have
already heard, this could lead to a real-life connection. People who are blind are argua-
bly one of the groups most enabled by online netporn developments, certainly textual
and voice-based ones, as compared to past options for access. Though porn is classically
associated with visual still or moving images, it does have many other forms, and with
anticipated developments in virtual reality, audio description and voice, its enablement
could continue to increase for people who cannot see.
Erotica, Sexual Content and Censorship

Implicit and explicit censorship has long been a concern to people who are blind. This
largely stemmed from the nature of the people or organisations who transcribed printed
material into braille or who made it available in audio. The large majority of these peo-
ple were well intentioned but sometimes biased volunteers, donating their time to make
‘important’ information available to the blind. Religious material, classics, and educa-
tional materials were the most commonly produced. Romances and family-friendly ad-
venture titles are also very popular.
Take a book like Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal, two recorded versions: One
studio read and complete, the other read by an older volunteer in Tasmania, Australia
(which somehow had five paragraphs missing, relating to a (relatively tame by today’s
standards) passionate night of lovemaking). An extraordinary coincidence, perhaps, but
not uncommon for the time.
The Braille edition of Playboy (produced by the National Library Service of the Li-
brary of Congress) was discontinued in the sixties due to ‘funding cuts’ until complaints
lead to its reinstatement. It was commonly believed at the time that this was a moral, not
a funding decision. Of course, only the articles were Brailled, the pictures not really be-
ing possible to produce in accessible and meaningful form.
Transcription and Description of Pornographic Content

98 C’Lick Me
While tactile diagrams have been produced for anatomy texts and sex education ma-
terials, the kinds of images found in erotic and pornographic materials are not really
expressible in tactile form, nor would the subtleties be necessarily understood in the
tactile medium.
Technologies, such as SMIL, and other multimedia standards for film production
now exist so that audio description and text captioning can appear along-side the visual
and regular audio tracks of online and DVD movies. While these technologies could
be used to add extra value to netporn materials, I am not, however, aware of any porn
equipped with descriptive soundtracks for people who are blind. Moaning, screaming
and distorted deep breathing don’t really tell the entire story, especially when they often
are not even synchronized with the ‘action’ on screen. With regards to an audio described
porn movie, the closest I’ve personally got to experience one was at an unplanned after-
dinner viewing of a new porn DVD, where two — not entirely sober — dinner-guests did
quite an admirable job of bringing the quieter parts of the action to life, with their mag-
nificently expansive and colourful verbal descriptions of the stars, their assets and their
antics. This real-time live audio description was certainly considerably more informative
and pleasant on the ear than was the monotone narration from the main star, who was
obviously selected for something other than his talent for narration!
Erotic literature in print form was difficult or impossible for blind people to access
historically, unless they could find a person who was prepared to read the material to
them. The Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) estimates that only 3-5 per-
cent of printed information is ever made available in formats accessible to people who are
blind or vision impaired. (Kavanagh 2002) and of this, it is a certainty that only a minus-
cule fraction of a percent of all the erotic literature in print is made available.
Computer-Mediated Information Access

The Internet has indeed opened a world to people who are blind containing vast quanti-
ties of textual erotica, whether from newsgroups dedicated to the subject, special interest
archives like www.nifty.org, or found on some commercial sites. This material is diverse,
and ranges from light reading, through to very specific fetishes and genres. In recent de-
cades, print-scanning optical character recognition technology, when combined with
text-to-speech synthesizers has meant that hither-to unavailable printed material can be
scanned, converted to text, and read in Braille or spoken aloud by a synthetic voice.
Erotica, as I am sure you can imagine, is not something that is brought most fully to
life when read by a robotic computer voice, where the pace of reading and the inflec-
tions are perfectly consistent throughout. But, erotically enlightened blind people will
tell you the world-over, when compared to no erotic material being available at all the
synthetic speech versions can do pretty damn well, when no better alternatives are avail-
able. Nevertheless, it takes some time for listeners to initially acclimatise themselves to
the nuances of their computer’s synthetic voice. However, over time, for most listeners,
the voices’ unnatural characteristics move further into the shadows, much like a speaker’s
accent becomes less noticeable as familiarity by the listener increases. That is to say, the
message conveyed in the words, progressively becomes less tainted by the constraints of
the medium of a synthetic voice.If, curious reader, you want to ‘see’ porn as I do, then I
invite you to listen to a short erotic story read out via synthetic speech with permission by
the author, Agave. Proudly and sizzlingly read out loud by IBM’s ViaVoice speech syn-
thesiser. Online at: www.timnoonan.com.au/PornAsISeeIt.mp3.
More recently, particularly with the flourishing area of Podcasting and audio on the
web, there is erotica available in the spoken word form, read by real people, which adds
a whole new dimension to the listening experience. One highly popular example is some
of the erotica readings by Violet Blue, as found on her Tiny Nibbles website, even en-
hanced with occasional sound-effects such as locking of chains and ‘bottom-smacking’
as heard in her podcast open source sex 04.mp3.9 In recent months an erotica exchange
list serve has recently been set up for people who are blind at eroticaforblind-subscribe@
yahoogroups.com and the following message was recently posted to my blindness and
technology list-serve, vip-l: “Erotica for the Sight Impaired. We are a company which
produces tasteful, non-violent erotica. We would like to correspond with sight-impaired
people who have an interest in this area to help us plan a new web site. Questions we have
include: What is out there now for the sight impaired? How can it be improved? What
conventional erotica is there which interests the sight impaired? What is erotic for you in
your sphere of senses? If you are interested send an email to jessica@feck.com.au.”
Conclusion
To date, netporn has had a significant impact on people with disability and particularly
people who are blind or vision impaired. That impact has been on the one hand un-
planned and largely unthought-of inclusion and on the other often unnecessary and
even careless exclusion from participation. We can’t change the past but we do have an
opportunity to architect a more inclusive and participatory online future for everyone.
But as long as researchers, entrepreneurs, designers and marketers of netporn persist
in thinking of people with disability as a group set-apart from everyone else, those in the
netporn industry will remain destined to design sites and services which are unnecessar-
ily crippled, myopic and flawed.
Adherence to open standards, accessibility guidelines, and interoperability, all con-
tribute to services which are more likely to be accessible. It’s not just a case of specially
designing for specific disabilities; it’s more about designing content and services which
are accessible to a diverse range of people, with diverse capabilities and limitations. I am
not particularly advocating creating ‘special services for The Disabled’; but rather am en-
couraging the development of well-designed services for all, as broadly as possible.
More research — both industry and academic — is clearly called for in the emerging
and flourishing domain we term netporn; research into the needs, desires and interests of
people with disability with respect to access and participation in erotic and pornographic
content. This will not only serve those of us with disability, it will — just as important-
ly — enhance both the quality and the usability of netporn services for us all!
100 C’Lick Me
Notes
1 The following three paragraphs are based on collaborative writing between Dr. Ge-
rard Goggin and the author. They are part of a chapter for a book examining blog-
ging and disability.
2 See www.aacsafeguarding.ca/resources-sexhealthk&saac.htm.
3 See www.goodvibes.com.
4 See www.lovebyrd.com.
5 Available from www.w3.org/WAI.
6 See www.utterpants.co.uk/news/sex/pornweb.html.
7 See http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/soc/courses/stpp4C03/ClassEssay/index2.htm.
8 Available on www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/parc/contrib/
DarkSideOfVR.txt.
9 From http://www.tinynibbles.com.
References
Arlidge, J. (2002) “The Dirty Secret that Drives New Technology: It’s Porn,” The Obser-
ver, Sunday March 3, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,661094,00.html.
Clare, E. (2002) “Sex, Celebration, and Justice: A Keynote for the Queerness and Disa-
bility Conference 2002,” Scarlet Letters: Sex, Celebration, and Justice,
www.scarletletters.com/current/101002_nf_ec.shtml.
Corker, M. and T. Shakespeare (2002) Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability

Theory, London, Continuum.
Goggin, G. and C. Newell (2002) Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disabi-
lity in New Media, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield.
Goggin, G. and T. Noonan, “Blogging Disability: The Interface Between New Cultural
Movements and Internet Technology,” A. Bruns and J. Jacobs (eds.), Uses of Blogs, New
York, Peter Lang, forthcoming.
Kavanagh, R. (2005) “The Erosion of Equitable Library Services for Print Disabled Ca-
nadians,’” CNIB Library,
www.cnib.ca/library/general_info_library/about_collection/feliciter_article.htm.
Marshall, J. (2003) “The Sexual Life of Cyber-Savants,” Australian Journal of Anthropo-

logy, vol. 14, no. 2, p. 229- 248. Also available at: www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_
m2472/is_2_14/ai_105657586/print.
McCabe, M.P. and G. Taleporos (2003) “Sexual Esteem, Sexual Satisfaction, and
Sexual Behavior among People with Physical Disability,” Archives of Sexual Behavior,
vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 359-369.
McKee, A. (2005) “The Effects of Pornography on Attitudes towards Sexuality: Implica-

tions for Policy Approaches to Internet Censorship in Australia,” G. Goggin (ed.), Vir-
tual Nation: The Internet in Australia, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press.
Shuttleworth, R. and L. Mona (2002) “Introduction,” Special Issue on ‘Focus on Sexual

Access for Disabled People,’ Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 4.
103
Report on the Location

of the Internet Adult Industry
Matthew Zook
Introduction
My research shows that the Internet adult industry is a globalized industry. Less than
half of the free adult websites are located in the United States, and this share has de-
clined since 2001. A conservative estimate places 32 percent of adult membership
websites, and 58 percent of free adult websites outside of the United States. In all likeli-
hood, the percentage of websites outside of the United States is higher than the figures
presented here, for several reasons discussed below. Furthermore, there appears to be
a steady diffusion of this industry away from the United States to other countries. Al-
though there are a number of reasons for the global distribution of the Internet adult
industry, three factors — regulation, low barriers to entry, and the diffusion of Internet
use — have played leading roles in shaping the location of the Internet adult industry.
These three factors offer a combination of push and pull incentives for the migration of
the Internet adult industry out of the United States.
Defining the Internet Adult Industry

The Internet adult industry is difficult to define as it includes products with offline coun-
terparts, e.g., images and video, as well as those without any offline equivalent, e.g., in-
teractive video chatrooms. Therefore, rather than using an arbitrary definition of the
Internet adult industry and seeking websites that fit it, this report first accesses existing
indices of adult websites (found via the Google search engine), and defines the industry
by what is listed in these indices. Based on this data, this report defines the Internet adult
industry as adult-oriented websites that are accessible to the entire Internet community
and offer adult images, audio, video, text, and chat to visitors. The majority of these web-
104 C’Lick Me
sites are commercially driven.

The definition used in this report does not include important distribution channels
such as newsgroups, bulletin board services (BBS), and peer-to-peer systems of exchange.
While these outlets are important to the online adult industry, they are difficult to capture
using this report’s methodology and often involve the exchange of images or conversa-
tions by individuals. This report does not account for illegal Internet activities such as
child pornography or prostitution.1
Throughout this report, the terms webpage and website are used. Webpage refers to
a single webpage available on the Internet, e.g., www.domain.com/page1.html or www.
domain.com/page2.html. Website refers to the domain name associated with a webpage,
e.g., domain.com, and is under the control of a single individual or organization. A web-
site can contain any number of webpages.
Structure of the Internet Adult Industry

Although standard economic data sources provide no data on the Internet adult industry,
it is possible to outline a general schematic of the industry based on secondary sources
(Lane, 2000; Franson, 1998; Glidewell, 2000; Perdue, 2001; Rose, 1997; Rosoff, 1999) as
well as materials posted on resource websites for would-be adult webmasters. Three geo-
graphically relevant and measurable components of the Internet adult industry include:
(1) the creation of content for the industry; (2) the creation and maintenance of websites
to distribute content; and (3) the hosting of websites. These activities are easily separated
(both organizationally and geographically) from one another. This report outlines the
structure of all three but focuses on the location of free and membership websites.
Content creation
Although the Internet makes it possible for anyone to distribute adult content, it appears
that a relatively small number of suppliers provide the bulk of the material to adult web-
sites. Klein (1998) notes that creating original content is “Relatively easy to do… [but]
relatively hard to do well.” Estimates suggest that “90 percent of free porn [web] sites,
and nearly all pay porn [web] sites, buy their material rather than create it themselves.”
(Rosoff, 1999). This is particularly true for video streaming and live interaction that re-
quires expensive equipment and facilities. Much of the video and interactive offerings
are reportedly generated from a small number of locations and then licensed to other
websites (Rose, 1997). Obtaining content is described as the least expensive component
of operating an adult website. Franson (1998) suggests that the cost for a website’s con-
tent is less than five percent of its total budget, as most of the budget is associated with
hosting expenses, i.e., paying for the bandwidth for the transmission of content.
Websites – free and membership

Adult websites on the Internet can be categorized into two groups: free or feeder web-
sites and membership websites. Membership websites require a payment (generally a
recurring monthly subscription paid via credit card) to access their materials. Member-
ship websites offer affiliate programs that pay free websites for surfers who are sent to
the membership website and subsequently sign up for a membership. Rosoff (1999) re-
ports that according to the “…YNOT Adult Network, free [web] sites comprise between
70 and 80 percent of the adult material out there. These [web] sites are used as “bait”
for pay [web] sites and make their money by successfully guiding viewers to premium
services on other [web] sites.” Free Internet adult websites have become increasingly
prevalent over time (Shreve, 2001) and offer free pictures amidst a maze of banners and
pop-up windows that direct visitors to membership websites. These websites are relative-
ly easy to establish. Franson (1998) estimates that a few thousands dollars (and in some
cases much less) is all that is required to start one.
This low barrier to entry has allowed many individuals to actively participate in the
industry regardless of location. In particular, the low demands of running free websites
make them particularly susceptible to re-location out of the United States. In fact, data
presented later in this report suggests that this diffusion to off-shore locations has been
steadily progressing since 1997.
While free adult websites comprise the largest number of adult websites on the In-
ternet, they do not contain the bulk of adult materials (images, video, etc.). Material
on these websites is often replicated on other websites and is designed to direct users to
membership websites. These membership websites are the source of revenue for the in-
dustry and are able to attract paying customers by offering a greater quantity and quality
of materials than the free websites. Thus, while smaller in overall numbers, these websites
contain the bulk of images and video available online.
Hosting
The final component of the Internet adult industry is the location of the computer upon
which the website is actually hosted. Because of large bandwidth requirements, compa-
nies specializing in the adult industry, rather than traditional hosting services, generally
host adult websites. Hosting options range from free hosting locations that come with a
large amount of advertising to starter hosting packages that offer shared hosting for $50
to $100 dollars a month. Because traffic to adult websites can build quickly, hosting is
generally the most significant cost to websites. Rosoff (1999) points out that “A couple
thousand users grabbing one or two high-quality images adds up to at least two gigabytes
per month.”
It is precisely these hosting costs that make the paid membership websites essential to
the functioning of a commercial Internet adult industry. The more content that is down-
loaded from a website, the higher consumption of bandwidth which ultimately must be
paid for. Without paid memberships, the Internet adult industry could not pay for the
bandwidth that it consumes.
Overall Size of the Internet Adult Industry

Even with a sense of its overall structure, it is difficult to obtain accurate figures on the
size and revenues of the adult industry either off- or on-line. Rough estimates suggest
106 C’Lick Me
that the percentage of adult material on the Internet is very small, ranging from less
than 1 percent (2001 and 2005 estimates) to 1.5 percent (1999 estimate) (Zook, 2003;
Adams, 2005; Lawrence and Giles, 1999).
However, it is difficult to determine the reliability of such estimates, which are de-
termined by comparing the number of web pages returned for keyword searches from a
search engine to the total number of webpages indexed. For example, keyword searches
for terms like “porn” or “xxx” return a number of non-adult webpages in the top ten re-
sults, including a Vegan informational website called “VeganPorn” and more than one
website for the 2002 Vin Diesel movie titled xXx.
Nevertheless, it is clear that adult web sites are an extremely small percentage of
material on the Internet and may be becoming an increasingly smaller percentage as
the Internet becomes more widely adopted in the United States and globally. Such a
decline would likely be tied to increased levels of other Internet based activities, e.g.,
e-commerce, e-government, etc., as well as the increasingly diverse demographics of
Internet users.
Surveying the Internet Adult Industry

It is possible to leverage geographically meaningful data based on the domain names of
websites to construct a picture of the Internet adult industry’s presence inside and out-
side of the United States.
Constructing a database of Adult Websites

The first step in the process is the generation of a list of websites associated with the
Internet adult industry. Rather than attempting to capture the complete population of
websites, indices and directories of adult webpages that are readily identifiable and avail-
able on the Internet to an English speaking user are utilized. These webpages, e.g.,
http://www.domain.com/page1.html or http://www.domain.com/page2.html, were ag-
gregated to the level of websites, e.g., domain.com. The total websites for each index are
provided in Table 1. Although the resulting database is much smaller than the likely to-
tal population of such websites, it nonetheless provides a reasonable sample of the web-
sites that an English-speaking Internet user would likely encounter.
Four different indices of adult websites that reflect different types of free and mem-
bership websites were used to construct a database of Internet adult industry websites. In
order to provide as much continuity as possible to earlier research (Zook, 2003), previ-
ously identified indices were used for this report.2 The indices are as follows:
• Adultreviews.net describes itself as “an independent [web] site aiming to give our
visitors some advice about adult websites.” It further lists its mission as providing “reviews
of a wide variety of adult pay [web] sites.” This focus on reviewing pay websites that users
might wish to join indicates that it is a good source of Paid Membership websites.
• Google (Membership & Non-Membership Websites) provides a listing of webpag-
es by topic via the GoogleDirectory (http://directory.google.com/Top/Adult/). These
listings are based on the DMOZ Open Directory report which describes itself as “the
largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and

maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” Anyone can submit a
website for inclusion in the directory, but it is categorized and placed by a human edi-
tor. Google Directory also makes a clear distinction between Membership and Non-
Membership websites.
• Adultwebmasters.org is a website that seeks to provide operators of adult websites
with services (such as sources for content and suggestions for vendors for website host-
ing) and the ability to network with one another. It also provides a listing of websites that
are reported to be membership websites. It appears, however, that there is little filtering
of these websites, thus making it impossible to determine whether the websites listed are
paid membership, free or a mixture of both.
• Sextracker.com is run by Flying Crocodile, Inc. and provides webpage rankings for
Internet adult websites (both free and membership). In this report all websites not listed
as free were collected. However, it is unclear how reliable this distinction is, making it
impossible to determine whether the websites listed are paid membership, free or a mix-
ture of both.
Table 1. Summary of Source of Adult Websites Used in Report
Type of Websites Date Source Websites
Paid Feb-2006 Adultreviews.net 426
Paid Feb-2006 Google (Membership)3 1,253
Free Feb-2006 Google (Non-Membership) 6,193
Mixed Feb-2006 Adultwebmasters.org 336
Mixed Feb-2006 Sextracker.com 4,143
This data was collected in February 2006 and is based on computer programs (web spi-
ders) designed to collect all the domains that are linked from a particularly webpage in-
dex. A total of 11,921 unique domain names were gathered for this research. Only 414
domains appear in more than one of the datasets indicating that each index represents a
different constellation of Internet adult industry activity.
Because the Google (Membership and Non-Membership websites) and Sextracker.
com (Membership website) indices were also used to gather data in 2001 (see Zook,
2003) it is possible to make comparisons with these three datasets over time.
108 C’Lick Me
Limitations of the database

First, this database (i.e., the five combined datasets) represents a sample of adult ori-
ented websites on the Internet rather than a complete census. This sample is based on
indices that are readily available to an Internet user conducting Google searches in Eng-
lish for adult materials.
The second (and much more significant) limitation of this database is the language
used in this generation of websites. Searches for adult website indices were conduct-
ed via Google.com from a location in the United States rather than alternative portals
specifically designed for different countries such as Google.de (Germany) or Google.fr
(France). Moreover, the search terms used were in English. Although English is the de-
facto language of the Internet, there is an increasing presence of non-English speaking
users and non-English web content. Internet WorldStats (2006) estimates that speakers of
English as a first language represent only 30.6 percent of Internet users. Because I have
used only English indices, the database of websites is shaded towards English speaking
countries such as the United States.
This shading of the database is particularly apparent in the case of German content
on the Internet. A brief examination of the top adult websites found via the Google.de
website revealed a number of prominently ranked German websites (i.e., 321liebe.de,
ab18frei.de, x-check.de, pporno.de, sex.de, xlook.de) that are not in the database gener-
ated for this report. Moreover, an examination of the top level domains (TLD) of do-
mains included in the database reveals that the number of .de domains is much smaller
than the total number of .de domains in existence. For example, the .de TLD is the
second largest TLD on the Internet (after .com), representing 10 percent of all Internet
domains, but only represents 0.3 percent of domains in the report database (See Table
2). Although a .de domain need not be registered to someone located in Germany, the
Table 2. Distribution of Domains in Report Database by TLD5

overwhelming majority of .de domains are held by individuals or firms located there
(Krymalowski, 2000).4
While German is the most striking example, a number of other language-TLD com-
binations (French-.fr, Dutch-.nl, and Italian-.it) are also under-represented in the data-
base relative to their Internet presence more generally. While the exact extent of this bias
towards English-speaking countries is impossible to measure, it is evidently significant.
Therefore, the results of this report should be interpreted accordingly, i.e., there is an
over-sampling of websites from English speaking countries such as the United States. As
a result the United States share of Internet adult industry websites is likely inflated.
Locating the Internet Adult Industry

The location of the company or individual that registered a domain name is based on
the information returned on a whois query as outlined by Zook (2000, 2001).6 Figure 1
illustrates the result of a whois query for nytimes.com. The Registrant information listed
indicates the individual or organization which registered and owns the domain and its
address. This address information is used in determining the location of a website. Al-
though there is no guarantee that the registration address for a domain name and the
actual location of the makers of the website is the same, I have shown in previous work
(Zook, 2001) that there is a strong correlation between the two.
Whois data was successfully gathered for 94.2 percent of the 11,921 domains in the
database. The 5.8 domains without whois data include: (1) domains that are no longer
registered (1.4 percent); (2) domains in TLDs that do not provide whois information,
e.g., .tv (1.0 percent); and (3) domains without geographical identifiers within the whois
information (3.4 percent). All three types of missing whois information are aggregated
Figure 1. Sample Whois record, NYTIMES.com.

110 C’Lick Me
and presented in this report as “Not Placed.”

One characteristic of the whois data is the use of whois proxy services. Many domain
name registrars (e.g., GoDaddy or ItsYourDomain) offer customers whois proxy services
that allow one to substitute a registrar’s location for the customer’s. Within the domain
name data there are approximately 374 domains which are making use of this proxy ser-
vice. As a result, 90 percent of these domains are listed as being located in the United
States based on the location of the registrar rather than the location of the individual
or organization which owns the domain. These registrars are overwhelmingly based in
the United States. If these domains were removed, the United States share would drop.
However, I have chosen to leave these domains in the dataset despite the known bias
towards the United States, which increases the United States share of the Internet adult
industry.
The combination of these factors — (1) the English language bias towards the United
States and (2) the whois proxy bias towards the United States — means that the figures pre-
sented in this report represent the likely maximum percentage of Internet adult websites
located in the United States. In all likelihood, the percentage of websites in the United
States is lower than the figures presented here.
Migration of the Internet

Adult Industry from the United States
Because of the role of the United States as the original location of the Internet, the dif-
fusion from it is a good indicator of how quickly an Internet activity is dispersing to the
rest of the world. Table 3 shows the percentage of the top 100 websites for seven differ-
ent categories located in the United States from 1997 to 2000. It shows that 79 percent
of the most visited adult websites were located in the United States in 1997. Three years
later the United States share of top adult websites had declined to 58 percent.
Table 3. Percentage of 100 Most Visited Websites Located in the United States7
Category Jul 1997 Oct 1999 Jan 2000 Oct 2000
Top 100 (All categories) 94 90 87 86
Shopping 86 97 93 94
Finance 75 85 87 89
News 67 66 65 72
Sports 70 79 77 75
Adult 79 68 64 58
Gambling n/a 67 52 39
A key observation from this table is that the category most likely to involve the shipment
of a physical item, shopping, remained the category that was most highly concentrated
in the United States where the largest number of Internet users and shoppers are located.
Other types of websites such as news or sports were more dispersed to begin with and did
not change much over time. In contrast, adult and gambling websites exhibited a steady
diffusion from the United States during the late 1990s and by 2000 had become the most
highly dispersed activities on the Internet. Although later time series data is not available
it seems reasonable (given the diffusion of other Internet metrics, i.e., users, domains, hosts,
etc. from the United States) that this trend would be continuing.
Current United States Share of the Internet Adult Industry

The whois information for domains in the database provides a look at the distribution of
membership and free websites around the world. Of particular interest is the percentage
of websites located within the United States.
The percentage of websites alone, however, does not tell the entire story; it is also
of interest whether particular countries are more focused than others on adult Internet
activities as a measure of total Internet activities. Countries that actively use the Internet
will have larger shares of all types of Internet activity. To control for this, Tables 4 through
9 standardize a country’s presence in the Internet adult industry with the number of do-
main names registered in that country. This measure, the Domain Name Ratio, divides
a country’s share of adult websites by its share of all domains (gTLD and ccTLD) world-
wide in December 2005. The source of this data is my ongoing domain industry research
of which an overview is available at ZookNIC (see www.zooknic.com). A value greater
than 1.0 indicates that the country has a stronger presence in the Internet adult industry
than on the Internet in general.
The data summarized in Table 4 represents the distribution of all 11,921 websites in
the database. It shows that less than half of all domains in the report database are located
in the United States. As discussed earlier, 5.8 percent of the domains in the dataset were
not placed in a country. In addition to considering the overall distribution of domains
from the dataset it is helpful to consider each data source as each represents a different
component of the Internet adult industry. This table shows that the United States has a
47.2 percent share of the Internent adult industry.
The data in Table 4 also shows that the United States is not as specialized (based
on its domain name ratio) as many comparable countries. For example, Canada and
Australia, both English speaking countries with similar Internet infrastructures and per
capita incomes, are more specialized than the United States in the Internet adult indus-
try. The United States has a 1.23 domain name ratio compared to 2.85 for Canada and
1.89 for Australia.
112 C’Lick Me
Table 4: Global Distribution of All Internet Adult Websites, 20068
Paid Membership Websites

The AdultReview data on paid membership websites (n=426) presented in Table 5
shows that the United States share is significantly higher (64.1 percent) than in the ag-
gregated data (47.2 percent). The domain name ratio (1.67) also shows that the United
States has a relatively higher share of these membership websites than its general Inter-
net presence would suggest. However, the United States’s relative share is significantly
lower than Canada (2.82), the Netherlands (1.88), Aruba (338.57), the Czech Republic
(3.39) and Antigua and Barbuda (16.87) which are highly specialized by this measure of
adult membership websites. Also of interest is the small domain name ratio for France
(0.57), which is likely tied to the English-language bias in the dataset.
The Google membership data (n=1,253) located in Table 6 also represents paid
membership websites. However, the threshold for listing in this index is perhaps less
stringent than that of the AdultReview data. Nevertheless, in comparison to the Adult-
Review data, the United States contains a similar percentage of membership websites
(68.5 percent) and has a similar domain name ratio (1.78). Again, a few small off-shore
locations (Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Cyprus) have extremely high
domain name ratios indicating a high specialization by this measure of the Internet adult
industry.
The Google Membership data is also comparable across time and indicates a slight
decrease in the United States’s share of these websites (from 70.4 percent to 68.5 per-
cent). The decline, however, is relatively small. Also interesting is the increase in the
domain name ratio from 1.65 to 1.78. This suggests that the United States has become
slightly more specialized in paid membership websites.
Table 5: Global Distribution of AdultReviews Paid Membership Websites, 2006
Mixed: Paid Membership and Free Websites

The distribution of websites from AdultWebmasters is outlined in Table 7. Although
AdultWebmasters lists these websites as membership websites there appears to be little
filtering of these websites, thus making it impossible to determine whether these web-
sites are paid membership, free or (most likely) a mixture of both. Certain “off-shore”
locations (Cayman Islands, Russian Federation, Panama, Czech Republic) exhibit ex-
tremely high domain name ratios suggesting a relatively strong role in the Internet adult
industry.
A second source of mixed websites is the Sextracker data located in Table 8. In this
case the United States share is significantly lower (46.3 percent) than its share in the
previous three sources. The United States domain name ratio is also lower. Again, an in-
creasingly familiar group of countries (Russian Federation, Czech Republic and the Phil-
ippines) represent a system of “off-shore” Internet locations that are highly specialized by
this measure. Also interesting to note is the very small domain name ratio for Germany
(0.14), also replicated in Table 6 and Table 9, that can perhaps be attributed to the Eng-
lish-language bias of the data discussed earlier. It is also possible to look at the Sextracker
data over time which indicates a sizable drop of 5.2 percent in the United States share
from 2001 to 2006. The domain name ratio, however, remains the same.
An interesting comparison between the distribution of the membership websites data
(Tables 5 and 6) and the mixed websites data (Tables 7 and 8) is the lower percentage
of websites located in the United States indicated for the mixed data. This could be tied
to the inclusion of free websites in the mixed data which are more likely to be located
overseas and thus diluting the United States share.
114 C’Lick Me
Table 6: Global Distribution of Google Paid Membership Adult Websites,

2001 and 2006
Table 7: Global Distribution of AdultWebmasters Adult Websites, 2006
Free Websites
The final metric for free websites (see Table 9) is the one for which the United States has
its lowest share (42.3 percent). This contrasts significantly to the membership websites
and is tied to the low-cost and the ease in which one can set up these websites. Free web-
sites also appear to be dispersing out of the United States at the highest rate. The United
States share of free websites dropped from 59.8 percent to 42.3 percent (a decline of 17.5
percent) from 2001 to 2006. Tied to this decline in the United States share is the corre-
sponding decline in the domain name ratio from 1.41 to 1.10 suggesting that the United
States is becoming less specialized in the provision of free Internet adult websites.
Table 8: Global Distribution of Sextracker Adult Websites, 2001 and 2006
Comparing Paid Membership and Free Websites

Due to the fact that Google is a source for data on both membership and free websites,
it is possible to compare these two groups directly. Figure 2 shows that 58 percent of free
adult websites are located outside of the United States, as compared to 32 percent of
paid membership adult websites.
Factors Contributing to the Diffusion

of Adult Websites Outside of the United States
Although there are a number of reasons for the distribution of the Internet adult indus-
try outlined in this report, three factors — regulation, low barriers to entry, and the diffu-
sion of Internet use — have played leading roles in shaping the geography of the Internet
adult industry. These factors offer a combination of incentives that push away from the
United States and pull towards other countries, diffusing the Internet adult industry out
of United States and into more peripheral nodes.
Regulation
The effect of regulation is seen most strongly in the case of Internet gambling where
there are relatively clear-cut laws prohibiting Internet gambling websites in the United
States, and as a result it is the most diffused Internet activity (See Table 3 and Wilson,
2003). Similarly, many of the most specialized locations in the Internet adult indus-
try are tied to places that offer havens from governmental regulation. Of the countries
with high domain name ratios listed in the above tables, Antigua, the Cook Islands,
the Philippines, Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Russia, are regularly reviewed by
the OECD’s anti-money laundering task force (OECD, 2000). These offshore locations
116 C’Lick Me
Table 9. Global Distribution of Google Free Adult Websites, 2001 and 2006
Figure 2. Share of Internet Adult Industry Websites Located Outside of the United
States, Google Data, 2006
became prominent in global systems by offering secrecy and flexibility to those who
needed it. The concentration of the Internet adult industry in these offshore locations
shows how the pre-existing characteristics and endowments of locations are continuous-
ly adapted to new opportunities.
Because both the product and payment for the adult industry can take place elec-
tronically, it is relatively easy for the industry to relocate to hospitable regulatory envi-
ronments. For example, if legislation were enacted to shut down these types of websites
located in the United States, the consequent market vacuum would likely result in the
creation of a new set of websites by individuals outside the United States.
Low Barriers to Entry

In addition to the push of regulation, the pull of an online industry with low start-up
costs and completely digital products provides economic opportunities for individuals in
peripheral locations. Unlike many types of electronic commerce, it is relatively straight-
forward to set up an adult website (although profitability is not guaranteed). Addition-
ally, the use of Eastern European actors and models for content creation reported by
Morais et al (1999) and the Economist (1998) is increasing the number of people famil-
iar with and active in the Internet adult industry. This combined with the availability of
skilled and low-cost (compared to the United States or Western Europe) technical labor
and lack of other economic opportunities make the Internet adult industry an attractive
proposition for some Eastern European countries. The Czech Republic, Poland and
Russia all appear in Tables 5 to 10 and are highly specialized in the Internet adult indus-
try as shown by their high domain name ratios.
Diffusion of Internet Use

The final key factor in the geography of the Internet adult industry (particularly the
trends showing a movement away from the United States) is the increasing number of
Internet users, inclusive of websurfers and webmasters, located outside of the United
States. Figure 3 illustrates this trend with the corresponding decline of the share of In-
ternet users located in the United States.
This appears to be particularly significant for the free websites represented by the
Google Non-membership data. Because these websites take little skill or capital to start,
literally anyone with an Internet connection can participate in this industry.
118 C’Lick Me
Figure 3. Share of Internet Users Located in the United States
NOTES
1 Due to its illegality, the exchange of child pornography on the Internet often occurs
through email exchanges and newsgroups and is rarely posted on websites and indexed.
2 Although Adultreviews.net and Adultwebmasters.org were identified in the research
process that led to my 2003 publication, they were not included in the data gather-
ing or analysis at that time. The decision not to include them was due to resource
constraints and availability of other similar sources. They are included in this re-
port, however, because some indices used in the 2003 publication, e.g., webmaster-
slounge.com and Nielsen Netratings’ Top Adult websites, are no longer available.
3 Given the large number of listings (both membership and non-membership) on
Google, this report is based on a random sample.
4 In the case of this report, 91 percent of .de domains associated with the Internet
adult industry are located in Germany.
5 The ws (Western Samoa) and tv (Tuvalu) TLDs can be registered by anyone in
the world and are actively promoted as alternatives to the com TLD (see Rhoads,
2006). This stands in marked contrast to the de (Germany), nl (Netherlands) or uk
(United Kingdom) TLDs which have more restrictive registration requirements.
6 The whois utility was first implemented in the 1980s and was designed to allow sys-
tem administrators to identify the person responsible for a particular set of comput-
ers so that they could contact them in the event of a problem. It is still used for this
function today.
7 Source: 1999 and 2000 data — Top Website list supplied by Go2Net - http://
www.100hot.com/ with location based on address of domain name; July 1997
data — Paltridge (1997) using the same methodology. Because the 100hot.com data
source is no longer available, additional time series data cannot be appended to this
data.
8 The high domain name ratio for the Cook Islands (and other countries in later
tables) is indicative of locations that have relatively small Internet presences in gen-
eral. For these countries even a small Internet adult industry presence will result in
a high domain name ratio.
9 Because there is no one single source that spans this entire represented time peri-
od, the data in this graph includes figures from NUA’s How Many Online, ClickZ
States and InternetWorldStats.
REFERENCES
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www.straightdope.com/columns/051007.html.
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346, 14 Feb, pp. 21-23.
Franson, P. (1998) “The Nets dirty little secret: Sex sells” in Upside, 10(4), pp. 78-82.
Glidewell, R. (2000) “Business lessons from online porn” in Upside, 12(4), pp. 194-
208.
Google (2005) “Sizing Up Search Engines”, http://www.google.com/help/indexsize.

html.
InternetWorldStats (2006) “Internet USERS BY LANGUAGE”, http://www.Internet-

worldstats.com/stats7.htm.
Klein, D. (1998) “Succumbing to the dark side of the force: The Internet as seen from
an adult website”, invited talk at the 1998 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June
17.
Lane, F.S. (2000) Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age,
Routledge, New York and London.
Krymalowski, M. (2000) ”Die Regionale Verteilung Domainnamen in Deutschland”

(The Regional Distribution of Domain Names in Germany), http://www.denic.de/me-
dia/pdf/dokumente/da_krymalowski.pdf.
120 C’Lick Me
Lawrence, S. and C. L. Giles (1999) “Accessibility and distribution of information on

the web” Nature, 400 pp. 107-109.
Morais, R., B. Nelson and R. La Franco (1999) “Porn goes public” in Forbes 163(12) 14
June, pp. 214-220.
OECD (2000) Review to Identify Non-Cooperative Countries or Territories: Increasing

The Worldwide Effectiveness of Anti-Money Laundering Measures 22 June, (OECD Fi-
nancial Action Task Force, Paris).
Paltridge, S. (1997) Webcasting and Convergence: Policy Implications. (OECD/

GD(97)221. Paris, France).
Perdue, L. (2001) “Few talk about it, but porn plays big role in Web economy”, Wall
Street Journal online, 21 March, http://www.eroticabiz.com/porntech.html.
Rhoads, C. (2006) “On a Tiny Island, Catchy Web Name Sparks a Battle” in Wall Street
Journal, March 29, A1.
Rose, F. (1997) “Sex Sells” in Wired Magazine, December.
Rosoff, M. (1999) An Inside Look at the Net Porn Industry – CNET, http://home.cnet.
com/Internet/0-3805-7-280110.html.
Shreve, J. (2001) “Smut glut has porn sites hurting” in Wired Magazine, March 9,
<http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,42061,00.html.
Sullivan, D. (2005) End Of Size Wars? Google Says Most Comprehensive But Drops
Home Page Count. SearchEngineWatch, September 27, http://searchenginewatch.
com/searchday/article.php/3551586.
Wilson, M. (2003) “Chips, Bits, and the Law: An Economic Geography of Internet
Gambling” in Environment and Planning A 32, pp. 411-426.
Yahoo! (2005) “Our Blog is Growing Up — And So Has Our Index” August 8, http://
www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html.
Zook, M. (2000) “The Web of Production: The Economic Geography of Commercial In-
ternet Content Production in the United States” in Environment and Planning A 32, pp.
411-426.
Zook, M. (2001) “Old Hierarchies or New Networks of Centrality? — The Global Ge-

ography of the Internet Content Market” in American Behavioral Scientist. 44(10), pp.
1679-1696
Zook, M.A. (2003) “Underground globalization: Mapping the space of flows of the In-
ternet adult industry” in Environment and Planning A. Vol 35(7), pp. 1261-1286.
SECTION 2
Digital Desire beyond Pornography

125
Paradise Lust:
Pornotopia Meets the Culture Wars1
Mark Dery
People are still having sex.
Despite the pitchfork-and-bible brigade’s crusade against gay marriage, sex ed, and that
Mother of Harlots and Abominations, the smutty soap opera Desperate Housewives,
America’s low-slung undercarriage is still well-lubricated with salacious soaps, erotic
novels, X-rated confessionals, and books of haute-porn photography calculated to steam
the veneer off your coffee table.
Exhibit A: In the fall 2004 season, Desperate Housewives was the second highest-rated
show on US television, averaging nearly 22 million viewers a week — stats that give proof
through the night that the American appetite for sex (vicarious sex, at least) is undimin-
ished.2 For the high-forehead set, there’s T. C. Boyle’s novel, The Inner Circle, about the
sex researcher Alfred Kinsey; the biopic Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson; and the com-
mercial photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, which
following the time-tested Playboy formula, pairs nude photos with brow-furrowing essays
by Gore Vidal, Salman Rushdie, and other heavy-hitters. For the Howard Stern demo-
graphic, there’s adult-movie queen Jenna Jameson’s New York Times bestseller, How to
Make Love Like a Porn Star — yet more evidence, if any is needed, that the Boogie Nights
culture of the porn-movie industry is slowly but surely going mainstream.
Judith Regan, whose ReganBooks published the Jameson mammoir, sees dollar signs
in what she calls the “porno-ization” of American culture. “What that means,” she told a
CBS reporter, “is that if you watch [what’s] going on out there in the popular culture, you
will see females scantily clad, implanted, dressed up like hookers, porn stars and so on.
126 C’Lick Me
And that this is very acceptable.”3 Further up the lowbrow-middlebrow-highbrow index,

the design critic Rick Poynor notes “the normalization of porn” in his book Designing
Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture:
The casting aside of inhibitions has been under way since the 1960s. It was given a
boost by the arrival of home video and with the coming of the World Wide Web in the
1990s the urge to strip away the final shreds of decorum became unstoppable. In the
last few years, sexual images have thrust their way into the everyday public sphere. […]
[W]e are in the process of designing a pornotopia in which sex, or at least our dreams
of sex, are allowed to permeate areas of life they should never have been permitted to
enter until recently.4
A striking example of the normalization of porn is the publishing-world trendlet repre-

sented by Story of O-flavored true confessions such as The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir
by Toni Bentley and The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet and allegedly
autobiographical novels such as The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Wom-
an by Nedjma and 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa P. Until recently, a
sexual memoir like The Surrender, a foul-mouthed paean to the joys of anal sex (sample
quote: “My ass is my very own back door to heaven”) and The Sexual Life of Catherine
M., an exhaustive chronicle of the author’s serial swinging in sex clubs and gang bangs,
would have been career suicide for the authors, a former dancer for The New York City
Ballet and editor of the respected art magazine Art Press, respectively. Now, it’s a shrewd
marketing move: The Surrender has sold over two million copies worldwide and earned
a scolding from the pope (every publicist’s dearest dream); as of early 2006, the global
sales of The Sexual Life stood at more than a million.
Even the neocon fop Tom Wolfe has sex on the brain these days (a thought that in-
spires a thrill of terror in those of us who would rather not contemplate the sexual side of
a cultural conservative whose signature get-up is a white suit, white lisle socks with polka
dots, and two-toned shoes — with spats, no less.) In his novella I Am Charlotte Simmons
(2004), Wolfe satirizes the keg-party debaucheries of today’s collegiate youth with suspi-
cious relish, rhapsodizing about “loamy loins” and “iliac crests” and “winking navels” in
fully engorged prose:
Slither, slither, slither, slither went the tongue, but the hand — that was what she tried
to concentrate on, the hand, since it had the entire terrain of her torso to explore and
not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns — oh God, it was not just at the border where
the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest — no, the hand was cupping
her entire right — Now! She must say ‘No, Hoyt’ and talk to him like a dog...5
(Yes, well, we’ve all been there. By the way, nothing says hot and sloppy like “otorhino-
laryngological.” Insert navel wink here.)
Western culture is defining deviancy up, it seems, as in: out of the underground,
SECTION 2: Digital Desire beyond Pornography 127
into the mainstream.6 Whether that’s symptomatic of the Decline of the West or the
Opening of the Public Mind depends, at least in part, on which side of the culture wars
you’re on.
America, in the early days of the 21st century, is a house divided.

According to Dr. Barnaby Barratt, president of the American Association of Sex Edu-
cators, Counselors, and Therapists, “The media are becoming more sensationalist and
more titillating” even as the religious right is becoming “far more conservative and Pu-
ritanical, sexually.”7
The historical tension, in the United States, between Old Testament morality and
the moral agnosticism of capitalism is giving Americans a nasty case of cognitive disso-
nance. The Faith of Our Protestant Fathers admonishes Americans to keep their eyes on
God and their noses to the grindstone. Meanwhile, the lesser angels of consumer cul-
ture whisper in the other ear, urging Americans to indulge in the instant McGratifica-
tion of their every infantile whim. Time and again, the Bible inveighs against greed and
materialism — “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor,
and you will have treasure in heaven,” Jesus counsels (Matthew 19:21) — yet capitalism
preaches the gospel of Get Rich Quick and He Who Dies With Most Toys Wins. In a
context unimagined by Hobbes, corporate wars over market dominance realize the 17th
century philosopher’s grim vision of a struggle for survival that pits “every man against
every man,” emphasizing individual gain over the collective good. It’s winner take all, in
the gladiatorial chariot race to market supremacy and Profit Maximization At Any Cost;
turn the other cheek, and your competitors’ wheel-scythes will cut you to ribbons.
Marx saw this coming. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), he notes the truly radical
nature of capitalism. Almost posthuman in its tendency to pursue its own profit-driven,
technologically determined course (a course that often runs roughshod over the social
and environmental interests of the humans it supposedly serves), capitalism doesn’t need
social ties or family networks, let alone Puritan morality, Marx implied. The bourgeois
epoch, he wrote, is characterized by the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social condi-
tions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation.”8
Which brings us, in roundabout fashion, back to the culture wars: From his vantage
point as an educator, sex therapist, and psychoanalyst, Dr. Barratt looks out on an Amer-
ica wracked by what he calls a sexual “civil war.” On one side, sex-positive straights and
gays, civil libertarians, crusaders for sexual freedom, and random rutters — you know, the
guy who just has to have that Make Your Own Dildo kit (“Thousands sold worldwide!
Just add water! Amazing detail!”), the girl who won’t leave home without her Ultravio-
let Jelly Rubber Butt Beads, the clammy-handed geek who actually owns one of those
creepy-funny Fleshlights hawked on every porn site (a male masturbation aid consisting
of a fleshy “cyberskin” orifice, discreetly concealed inside a fake flashlight).9
128 C’Lick Me
“The seductive, inviting Pink Mouth FleshLight™ [with] soft, pliable, non-vibrating Real
Feel Super Skin® sleeve…made from a patented, high-quality material designed to repli-
cate the unmistakable sensations of penetrative sex.” Text and image from the Fleshlight
website, http://www.fleshlight.com/main/product_info.php?products_id=54. Reproduced
under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
On the other side of this kulturkampf are Christian soldiers marching as to war against
frank, factual talk about sex in the classroom, school libraries, or student newspapers.
According to the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Sex & Censorship Commit-
tee, fundamentalist groups are clamoring for censorship of medically accurate sex infor-
mation.10 In its place, they champion a faith-based ideology that urges America’s youth
to gird up its loins against Satan’s temptations by foreswearing masturbation, contracep-
tion, abortion, and homosexuality, and arming themselves with abstinence (some faith-
based curricula urge kids to bring Jesus along on that hot date, as a “chaperone”).
By their fruits ye shall know them: According to a Planned Parenthood factsheet, the fruits
of abstinence-only sex ed include public schools forced to host “chastity” rallies in which stu-
dents pledge to God that they will remain chaste until marriage; chapters on AIDS and con-
traception purged from a ninth-grade health textbook in North Carolina because it violated
state law requiring abstinence-only education; a seventh grade health teacher in Belton, Mis-
souri suspended when a parent complained that she had discussed “inappropriate” subject
matter in class.11 (The hapless instructor answered a student’s question about oral sex).
If a little learning is a dangerous thing, faith-based cluelessness is suicidal at a mo-
ment when, according to Planned Parenthood, the United States “has the highest rate of
teen pregnancy in the developed world, and American adolescents are contracting HIV
faster than almost any other demographic group.”12 Experts cite a dearth of comprehen-
sive, factually accurate sex education and a lack of access to contraceptive devices, such
as condoms, as the root of such evils. “By contrast, the ‘European approach to teenage
sexual activity, expressed in the form of widespread provision of confidential and acces-
sible contraceptive services to adolescents, is…a central factor in explaining the more
rapid declines in teenage childbearing in northern and western European countries,’”
Planned Parenthood notes.13
Meanwhile, in America, the sleep of reason is breeding monsters: In Granite Bay,
California, a student asked where his cervix was; another student wanted to know if oral
sex could make her pregnant.14 No, Virginia, only Our Heavenly Father can break na-
ture’s laws. This we know, for the bible tells us so in Saint Luke, where the Holy Ghost,
er, came upon the Virgin Mary, as scripture puts it. (One uses the verb advisedly.)
According to Dr. Barratt, “there is more opposition to sexual expression than ever”
because “sexual values” are a flashpoint in the culture wars. “We now have the govern-
ment attacking scientific research,” he says. “The NIH [National Institutes of Health]
has a blacklist of researchers who will not get funds because they are seen as being on the
wrong side of the government’s agenda…of abstinence-only [sex] education.”
America is gagged and bound by the “moral values” of neo-Puritans and paleoconser-
vatives such as Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma and
co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS who preaches abstinence as
a mighty bulwark against the virus, worries that lesbianism is “so rampant in some of the
schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom” at a time,
and believes that “the gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every
area across this country.”15 In 1997, Coburn castigated NBC for encouraging “irrespon-
sible sexual behavior” by flaunting “full frontal nudity” during prime time The nudity in
question? Death-camp inmates in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.16
But, mirabile dictu, at the very moment that self-appointed morals czars are making
schools, network TV, and SuperBowl half-time shows safe for theocracy (if not for de-
mocracy), the Web often feels like one big petri dish, culturing mutant strains of por-
nography and bizarre new paraphilias. (“Paraphilias” is the psychiatric term for a class of
psychosexual disorders characterized by extreme or dangerous desires, specifically those
involving suffering, humiliation, and/or nonhuman objects or nonconsenting partners.
Pedophilia, necrophilia, scatologia, bestiality, S/M, transvestism, voyeurism, exhibition-
ism, and frotteurism — sexual gratification by rubbing against strangers in crowded pub-
lic places — are all paraphilias.17)
In truth, adult-oriented sites make up less than two percent of all web content, ac-
cording to the journal Nature.18 Nonetheless, as a 2002 study by the National Academy
of Sciences notes:
While sexually explicit material comprises only a small fraction of online content, that
fraction is highly visible and…accounts for a significant amount of Web traffic.19 […]
[T]he adult online entertainment industry…generates about $1 billion a year in rev-
130 C’Lick Me
enue from adults who pay to view content. […] There are also a plethora of noncom-
mercial sources of pornography on the Internet, such as peer-to-peer file exchanges,
unsolicited e-mail, Web cameras, and chat rooms.20
By this, I don’t mean that we’re witnessing a runaway proliferation of alternative sexuali-
ties; the truth, I suspect (again, based on purely anecdotal evidence), is that the inter-
connected nature of the link-driven Web, together with the frenzy of online advertising,
has simply made “highly visible” what was once kept far from public view, under plain
brown wrappers or behind the locked boudoir doors of adventuresome sybarites.
Back in the day, the lone “invert” luckless enough to find himself marooned in,
say, Nebraska, could only bite his pillow and curse the heavens for making him cursed
among men, the only homosexual on Earth. In Glenn Holsten’s documentary movie,
Gay Pioneers (2000), veterans of the struggle for gay liberation reminisce movingly about
the mind-shattering moment when they stumbled on newsletters published by early gay-
pride organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis---trans-
missions from another galaxy that told them They Were Not Alone.
Today, anyone with an Internet connection is only a click away from a parallel uni-
verse of sexual solar systems whose porn sites, toy shops, networking sites, and support
groups orbit around obscure obsessions. The Web not only connects geographically far-
flung devotees into close-knit communities, it also assaults unsuspecting “normals” with
porn spam and X-rated search results for sites and products that cater to every imaginable
(and unimaginable) proclivity.
From the late 19th century, when Krafft-Ebing mapped the geography of the “degen-
erate” imagination in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), until 1973, when the American Psy-
chiatric Association deleted homosexuality from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders, official culture pathologized virtually everything but missionary-po-
sition heterosex; “moral degenerates” were stigmatized, criminalized, institutionalized.
Now, the loves that dared not speak their names trumpet them from the rooftops, online.
It’s the Revenge of the Repressed.
This is partly about the Newtonian physics of contemporary society: For every repres-
sive action from the dominant culture, there is an equal and opposite transgressive reac-
tion from subcultures, who as deviancy is defined up have to ratchet up their iconoclasm
in order to earn the bourgeois seal of disapproval that is the badge of true transgression.
It’s about punching through the cultural clutter, to borrow a term from advertising---get-
ting your message across.
Of course, online porn peddlers need to make themselves heard, too, and taking
fetishes to gut-lurching extremes is a proven means of grabbing pornsurfers by the eye-
balls. Thus the proliferation of “object-insertion” sites like BrutalDildos.com, Extreme-
Hole.com, and ButtCam.com, which feature women inserting impossibly humongous
dildos and anything else within reach — baseball bats, Barbie dolls, zucchinis, cooking
whisks — into their orifices. As a post by a writer on the pornoblog Jaxon Jaganov suggests,
object-insertion sites and other Web-porn tropisms toward the extreme have more to do
From SwimmingFullyClothed.com, http://www.swimmingfullyclothed.com/. Reproduced
under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
132 C’Lick Me
Neck-Brace Fetishist (http://www.nbak.tierranet.com/pixs/Nwoods01.jpg), from NBAK.

tierranet.com. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
Photo by Shinji Yamazaki, from Secret Magazine, Belgium. Image taken from the
“Art Gallery” archived on the Neck Brace Art Appreciation Klub website, http://www.nbak.
tierranet.com/art.htm. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
All images from the now-defunct Big-Gulp website. Reproduced under the Fair Use provi-
sion of US copyright law.
Breast-expansion morph by Mister Licker.
URL unknown. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
Breast-expansion morph,
uploaded by Estradiol to the
Breast Expansion Archive,
http://www.bearchive.com/menu.html.
Title: LongHorns. Reproduced
under the Fair Use provision of
US copyright law.
Breast-expansion morph by Holly Witt.

URL unknown. Reproduced under the Fair
Use provision of US copyright law.
with the endlessly revolutionary nature of capitalism mentioned earlier, as well as the
persistence of virulent sexual stereotypes, than they do subcultural rituals of resistance:
Somewhere at some point someone decided that the fun need not be limited to dildos
and other sex toys. Why not try and get chicks to stick all sorts of stuff into their puss-
ies? And so ‘Object Insertion’ porn was born, so to speak. First and foremost, this niche
is about novelty — it’s about grabbing you by the eyeballs and getting you to say, ‘Did
that chick really just stick a cellphone in her crotch?’ Once they’ve got your attention,
different pornographers go off in different directions. For some, it’s all done in the spirit
of wacky sexual escapades, kind of like a pornographic variation on Jackass-type stunts.
For others, it’s a more mean-spirited, degrading-chicks sort of thing that might have to
do with an unconscious anxiety about death, birth, maybe their mothers, or more likely,
a deep-seated fear of an empty bank account.21
Then, too, the fragmentation of the mass audience into a zillion microniches has in-
spired online advertisers to go after the alt.sexualities demographic. As a result, even a
websurfer who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night has probably been spammed
with a come-on from a sexual subculture whose deviant desires would have given Freud
anaphylactic shock. Spam and search engines have made the invisible visible, a god-
send to sexological researchers and connoisseurs of Xtreme kink who engage in what
the sexpert Susie Bright calls “pornographic rubbernecking.”
We’re living in the Golden Age of the Golden Shower, a heyday of unabashed de-
pravity (at least, in terms of online voyeurism and virtual sex) that makes de Sade’s 120
Days of Sodom look like VeggieTales. The Divine Marquis never imagined aquaphiliacs,
a catchall category that includes breath-holding fetishists, fans of simulated drowning,
and guys whose hearts leap at the sight of babes in bathing caps or who delight in un-
derwater catfights or submarine blowjobs. Weirdest of all are the aquaphiliacs who get
off on swimming and showering fully clothed, like SuitPlayer, a guy in Amsterdam who
likes to swim in his “business suits, dress shirts, and suit jackets — especially the one with
two vents.”22
Of course, weirdness is a relative concept. SuitPlayer looks like the Guy Next Door
alongside the members of the Neck Brace Appreciation Klub,23 a “small but dedicated
group of regular folks” who just happen to be into “‘recreational & artistic’ neck and back
bracing.” (Love those ironic quotes.)
Then again, they seem unremarkable compared to the fetishists who congregate at
the unintentionally hilarious Big-Gulp website24 to savor the tongue-in-cheek pleasures
of homemade fanporn in which anonymous models25 and celebrities, from Madonna26 to
Lou “Incredible Hulk” Ferrigno,27 gobble up wriggling Lilliputians. Imagine an X-rated
Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, remade by Dino DeLaurentis from a script by R. Crumb.
Imagine a hardcore version of The Amazing Colossal Man, starring gay superstud Zak
Spears as the bald, bediapered giant. Imagine — oh, hell, it simply beggars description;
just visit the damn thing yourself.28
136 C’Lick Me
But aquaphilia, neck-brace fetishism, and sexual fantasies about being gobbled up
man-eating Brobdingnagians are only the beginning. Poking around the web’s darker
corners, fetishists, pornographic rubberneckers, and sexologists can find sexual proclivi-
ties and pornographic subgenres de Sade never dreamed of: amputee worship, armpit
fetishism, clown porn, and sneeze freaks, who rejoice at the thought of a nice, juicy
honk, with plenty of spritz. Lactating transsexuals? Been there. Scrotal inflation? Done
that. Chicks with dicks and men with cunts? So last year, already. Erotic illustrations of
Japanese schoolgirls in traction? Check. Breast-expansion fantasies about mammaries
that balloon up to Goodyear blimp proportions? Check. Models made, through digital
trickery, to sprout multiple, massive breasts, like some freakish cross between silicone-
injected porn stars and pre-Christian fertility goddesses? Check.
Things are getting weird out there, so much so that imaginary obsessions such as
exophilia, the “abnormal attraction [to] beings from worlds beyond earth” that is the
subject of the underground novel Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, by the pornoblogger Super-
vert, are starting to sound downright plausible.29 Can we be far from the future foretold
by J.G. Ballard, where car-crash enthusiasts get off on vehicular manslaughter and fans
of Space Age snuff revel in footage of astronauts being roasted alive during re-entry? In
the introduction to his 1974 novel Crash, Ballard wondered if the android numbness in-
duced by media bombardment — the “demise of feeling” — would open the door to “all
our most real and tender pleasures — in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex
as the perfect arena…for…our…perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own
psychopathology as a game.”30
The answer to Ballard’s question is written in the morning headlines. In September
2005, the Web was abuzz with stories about US soldiers taking trophy snapshots and
making homemade music videos, set to kickass rock, of themselves booting a wounded
prisoner in the face or puppeteering the arm of a corpse to make it wave, or mugging for
the camera around the charred corpse of what a caption gloatingly calls a “cooked Iraqi.”
Thomas Doherty, a film-studies professor quoted in an L.A. Times story about the scandal,
gave one homemade video the Roger Ebert thumbs-up for its “contrapuntal editing — the
beat of the tune and the flash of the images,” judging it “a very slick piece of work.” He
quipped, “The MTV generation goes to war. They should enter it at Sundance.” A star
is born: the David Fincher of atrocity porn.31
Images like the nauseating close-up of the dead Iraqi who refused to stop at a US
checkpoint, a mess of bloody pulp where his head used to be, are porn, albeit porn of the
most atavistic sort. They’re porn because the young, male viewers who look at them do
so with a voyeuristic, high-fiving glee familiar to anyone who has ever watched hardcore
videos with a drunken gang of guys at a bachelor party. (The L.A. Times story describes
the fiancée of one soldier walking into a room where her hubby-to-be “was showing [his
war] videos to friends, who were ‘whooping and hollering.’”32) They’re porn because the
carrion-feeders who might otherwise be peddling hardcore are now hawking video gore
to the chickenhawks back home. They’re porn because they poke a stiff little finger into
the killer-ape part of our brains, right where the desire to fuck gets confused with the
Warporn. “Cooked Iraqi,” posted April 15, 2005, by sideburnz, at the now-defunct website
ThatsFuckedUp.com. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
Tentacle hentai (Japanese pornographic comic books, animated movies, and videogames).
URL unknown. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
3D rendering of tentacle hentai.

Fan art. URL unknown.
Japanese “ero-guru” (“erotic-grotesque”) Reproduced under the Fair Use
manga image. URL unknown. Repro- provision of US copyright law.
duced under the Fair Use provision of US
copyright law.
urge to fuck shit up.

Consider ThatsFuckedUp.com, which offered one-stop shopping for war-core and
amateur porn, sometimes in a single, sick-making image. (“Offered,” past tense, because
the site is now offline. The Polk County Sheriff’s Office and the Florida State Attorney
secured the conviction on obscenity charges of its webmaster, Christopher Wilson.) One
photo shows a prone woman, presumably an Iraqi, whose leg is a bloody stump, blown
off by a land mine. Under the hem of her skirt, we can see her vagina. “Nice puss — bad
foot,” reads the wisecracking caption. Pardon my Wilhelm Reich, but could our queasy
tendency to express our bloodlust in the metaphoric language of porn, here as in the Abu
Ghraib photos, be at least in part the pathological cost of our repressed sexuality?
Meanwhile, back on the home front, the web is engendering Middle America’s growing
awareness that the universe of human sexuality is much bigger — and stranger —than it
ever imagined. Of course, this awareness isn’t necessarily loosening the corset of Ameri-
can Puritanism. Ward and June Cleaver may have taken a wrong turn in cyberspace
and found themselves face to face with fetishists who thrill to mummylike swaddling
in Cling-Wrap or “furverts” who make it with plush toys (or, better yet, as plush toys),
but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t stone the sodomites if they could. Nonetheless, the
mainstream is more aware of the far fringes than ever before, a fact of 21st century life
that grain by grain, erodes the very notion of the normal.
This awareness is due, in part, to the porn spammers mentioned earlier, and to the
connectionist nature of the medium: the web’s forking paths can lead the unwary wander-
er down dark alleys, without warning. But the heightened profile of fetishism is also due
to the escalation of subcultural hostilities mentioned earlier — the ever-greater extremes
required of would-be Rebels Without a Cause in the age of Jackass, Extreme Makeovers,
and the pierced whatever. Time was when all a brooding young boho had to do to épater
le bourgeoisie was carve a swastika in his forehead and cop a witchy, Dylan Klebold stare.
But how do you certify your cred as a Menace to Society in a world where soccer moms
think Eminem is da bomb diggity and Nabisco is selling Xtreme Jello-O, for Chrissakes?
How long will it be before Marilyn Manson shows up at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic,
trading chip-shot tips with Alice Cooper?
In jaded times such as ours, nothing gets the full and undivided attention of Paren-
tal Authorities like the breezy, insouciant admission that you’re into, oh, I don’t know,
“crush” fetishism — sexual arousal at the sight of bugs, mice and other vermin impaled
on the stiletto heels of sneering dominatrixes. The Death of Affect that J.G. Ballard has
called “the greatest casualty of the 20th century” is here to stay. Years of tabloid media,
reality TV, attacking heads, and, more recently, nightly news nightmares of doomed
workers leaping from the World Trade Center, hand in hand, or journalists beheaded in
your livingroom by jihadi or the slapstick torture at Abu Ghraib — home movies from hell
that employed the visual grammar of porn — have cauterized our cultural nerve endings.
Little wonder, then, that ever greater subcultural voltages are needed to shock us.
This explains those mind-crushingly weird Japanese porno comics, a category that
140 C’Lick Me
includes the aptly named subgenre of ero-guru (“erotic-grotesque”) manga, or graphic

novels, by artists such as Toshio Saeki33 or Suehiro Maruo34— splatterpunk fantasies so
depraved they’d make a lust murderer queasy. A closely related genre, tentacle-rape hen-
tai, consists of X-rated cartoons depicting young girls ravaged by giant octopi or many-
armed aliens or robots. Tentacle-rape imagery descends from the erotic prints of 19th
century “floating world” artists such as Hokusai, whose “Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife”
is a classic of the genre.
“The point in rubbernecker pornography is sensation,” writes Susie Bright, in her
essay “The Future of Porn.” The point, she argues, “is a physical jolt, a thrill, a taboo
which until this gross-out moment was intact.” At the moment, nothing says “gross-out”
like bukkake, a supremely icky phenomenon brought to you by Japan, that empire of the
crossed signs where pubic hair is airbrushed off porn but no self-respecting salaryman
would leave home without a pair of soiled panties sewn into the lining of his hat.35 In
Bukkake Classic, a group of men masturbate on a woman’s upturned face. Typical buk-
kake photos are pure gothic, so underexposed they look like Polaroids taken in Gilles de
Rais’s dungeon. The men look like celebrants in some strange, subterranean ritual, at
once blank-eyed yet intensely absorbed in the task at, er, hand. Why aren’t they wearing
Masonic aprons or black hoods? Where’s the Church of Satan when you need it?
Like all S/M, bukkake is ritualized domination, a domination dramatized in bukkake
by the messy desecration of feminine purity, the purer the better. (The Japanese, who in-
vented the genre, prefer symbols of pristine innocence or white-cotton cleanliness: barely
legal Lolitas dressed as schoolgirls, nurses or, bizarrely, bunnies.) “They plan to use her
for their own sexual satisfaction, then completely HUMILIATE her!,” pants a come-on
for the tellingly named FacialHumiliation.com.36 Nothing new, here, to anyone familiar
with de Sade’s gleeful descriptions of virgins flogged, sodomized and worse.
What is new, in at least one corner of the “facial” cumshot universe, is the wedding
of the genre’s de Sadean theater of dominance and degradation with digital software’s
ability to retouch or even reinvent photographic reality. The best of them — produced,
or at least peddled, by PrivateGold.com, a domain name registered to a Cyprus-based
company — depict radiantly smiling, impeccably made-up models, glossy lips parted to
receive a shot of goo.
Clearly targeting the American market, PrivateGold’s images trade the abject deprav-
ity of Japanese bukkake for a pert, Pepsodent-smiling optimism. In the best American
tradition, they celebrate technological progress, each model retouched to posthuman
perfection, each cock enhanced to highlight its bulging glans and knotty veins, making
it look like the ripped, rock-hard arm of a bodybuilder. Like Wayne Newton, Wendy
Whoppers, and other pure products of American madness, PrivateGold’s facials are a
monument to delirious artificiality.
Their supersaturated aesthetic harks back to Technicolor movies, the airbrushed al-
bum-cover art of the ‘70s, and the paintings of Maxfield Parrish. At the same time, they’re
utterly contemporary in their winking subversion of their own conventions. Evoking the
happy, shiny irony of Diesel ads, they act out many male sex consumers’ apparent desire,
Bukkake. From PrivateGold.com, no longer online. Reproduced under the Fair Use provi-
Bukkake. From PrivateGold.com, no longer online. Reproduced under the Fair Use provi-
equal parts Freud and Marx, to soil the android perfection of supermodels and centerfolds
with a sticky puddle of splort. You don’t have to be a kill-your-TV, No Logo refusenik, rag-
ing against the machine, to see PrivateGold’s farcical facials as a squirt in the eye of the
inflatable, untouchable goddesses of American advertising. This is what all the leering
couples wrestling with spraying hoses in those Newport cigarette ads37 would look like, if
Newport came clean about its subliminal seductions. “Alive with Pleasure,” indeed.
Digitally retouched “facials” are postmodern porn, reveling in a hyperreality whose
gleaming highlights and strobe-photography special effects — gobs of cum, frozen in mid-
flight like the droplets in Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s famous “Milk-Drop Coronet” — are
both realer than real and hopelessly unreal.
The hyperreality of PrivateGold’s facials reaches its dizziest heights in the cumshots
themselves, zigzagging trajectories that bend more laws of physics than Carrie-Anne
Moss in The Matrix, suspended in mid-air while the camera swooped around her in real
time. In one image, a jet of jism pulls a sudden right turn, away from the woman’s waiting
lips, toward another, outstretched penis, as if drawn by a homoerotic magnetism.
In another, a streaking comet of cum appears to loop the loop, while in another it
turns on a dime and rockets away from the model’s mouth, mere millimeters away, to-
ward the startled viewer.
And then there’s the photo that gives new meaning to the phrase “splatter movie”: a
triumph of special effects, it features a phallus mirabilis that simultaneously ejaculates
two streams of cum in different directions. One spurts into the model’s mouth while the
other whizzes toward her eyebrow, doubling back at the last minute to carom off her nose,
zing past her cheek, and exit stage right.
So, what’s the deeper meaning of this repeated visual trope? Are PrivateGold’s fake
facials our first glimpse of posthuman porn? Is this what the postmodern theorist Arthur
Kroker had in mind when he announced the advent, in the late ‘80s, of a delirious simu-
lacrum of posthuman sex — a “sex without secretions”? In his Panic Encyclopedia (1989),
Kroker argued that digital tech had at last made sex without bodily fluids possible in the
form of “the computerized phone sex of the [pre-Internet] Minitel system in Paris” and
what he called “video porn for the language of the gaze” — academic theoryspeak for
screen-age porn that plays to the disembodied sexuality of an ever more voyeuristic soci-
ety.38 Gazing upon the Desert of the Real, Kroker declared that we had “already passed…
beyond sex as nature and beyond sex as discourse, to sex as fascinating only when it is
about recklessness, discharge and upheaval” — a premonition of Ballard’s eroticized car
crashes and Susie Bright’s rubbernecker porn, where orgasm is displaced by the “physical
jolt” of trashing a taboo. For Kroker, cybersex is a “parodic sex” — an unproductive, rather
than a reproductive, act. Solo in front of a flickering screen or among fellow pseudonyms
in a chatroom, or (for the hopelessly old-school) on the phone, its lonely onanism is as
distant from flesh-against-flesh sex as The Matrix’s time-stopping, gravity-defying triple
kicks and cartwheels are from pre-CGI fight scenes.
Speaking of which, maybe PrivateGold’s F/X facials offer a premonitory glimpse of
a porn unshackled from the hidebound realism that has hobbled it for decades. Where
144 C’Lick Me
is it writ that porn, which has always exhibited a tropism toward the unnatural, must be
naturalistic? Plastic surgery and Photoshop have already given us porn stars who look
as if they’ve been remodeled by the imagineers responsible for Disney’s Audio-Anima-
tronic robots. The literalism ushered in by photography and film is a historical anoma-
ly; pre-modern porn is fraught with impossible anatomies and unnatural acts, from the
multiple-breasted effigies of fertility goddesses such as the Ephesian Artemis to the men
with Godzilla-sized units and the women with giant-clam vulvas in 18th and 19th century
Japanese woodcuts. Now, pornographic hobbyists such as the incomparable Nexus T.,
armed with image-manipulation software, are conjuring up images worthy of medieval
bestiaries, or maybe a postmodern Decameron. And, wittingly or not, they’re exorciz-
ing cultural anxieties about genetic hybrids and human-animal transplants with campy,
tongue-in-cheek porn.
Of course, porn is inherently cyborgian. As Lynn Hunt, a professor of history at the
University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times writer John Tierney, pornography
“reduces sex to a set of technologies that arouse desire, satisfy desire, create new desires.”39
In Dr. Hunt’s opinion, “pornography is about cataloguing all the variations, treating hu-
man bodies as interchangeable parts in machines.”40 (Think of the daisy-chained orgiasts
in the illustrations for de Sade’s novels, mechanically coupling like some perverse as-
sembly line.) It’s a no-brainer, then, that a truly pomosexual porn, combining Hol-
lywood-style prosthetic effects and computer-graphics, the swooningly sensual aesthetic
of Japanimation, the breathtaking wirework of martial-arts movies like Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon, and the post-literate visual narratives of Cindy Sherman or Gregory
Crewdson, is long overdue. “I can now do 50 simultaneous events in a fluid, unending
shot,” John Gaeta, visual effects supervisor for The Matrix Reloaded, told the movie critic
David Edelstein. “And I can have all this action make sense and interrelate, and I can
follow it with a God’s-eye camera moving at speeds that would tear an ordinary camera
apart. I guarantee you your brain will work harder than any action movie you’ve ever seen
in your entire life.”41
But what if we want to work our libidos? Imagine cum spiraling through the air in
Matrix-style “bullet time”; clusterfucks inspired by The Matrix Reloaded’s so-called “Bur-
ly Brawl,” hundreds of digitally cloned copies of a single actor coupling in a narcissist’s
vision of a group grope. And why stop there? How about an Imax version of George Ba-
taille’s Story of the Eye? Or a computer-graphic take on Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Gar-
den, based on a screenplay by Matthew Barney? Speaking of whom, bring on the satyrs!
The petroleum jelly! The undifferentiated internal sex organs! The retracted scrotum
pierced with clasps connected to vinyl cords! Lame though they may be, PrivateGold’s
F/X facials are surely a vision of things to come.
NOTES
1 I owe the term “pornotopia” to the design critic Rick Poynor, author of Designing
Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture, a book that is as drily funny as it is sharply
insightful.
From Project-P From Project-P From Project-P
(http://projectp.tfcentral. (http://projectp.tfcentral. (http://projectp.tfcentral.com/
com/main01.html), by Jen- com/main01.html), by main01.html), by Nexus T. ©
ny P. © Jenny P.: all rights Nexus T. © Nexus T.: Nexus T.: all rights reserved.
reserved. Reproduced un- all rights reserved. Repro- Reproduced under the
der the Fair Use provision duced under the Fair Fair Use provision of US
of US copyright law. Use provision of US copyright law.
copyright law.
From Project-P (http://projectp.tfcentral.com/main01.html), by Nexus T. © Nexus T.: all

rights reserved. Reproduced under the Fair Use provision of US copyright law.
146 C’Lick Me
2 “Averaging nearly 22 million viewers a week”: Reuters News, “ABC Sorry for
Desperate Housewives Football Plug,” November 16, 2004, http://entertainment.
tv.yahoo.com/entnews/va/20041116/110066149200.html.
3 Stewart, J. (2005) “Raw Profit On The Printed Page: Jim Stewart Reports On
Booming Sex And Porn Publishing Industry,” CBSNews.com, http://www.cbsnews.
com/stories/2005/01/05/60II/main664950.shtml.
4 Poynor, R. (2006) Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture, New York,
Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 7, 9.
5 Wolfe, T. (2004) I Am Charlotte Simmons, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p.
369.
6 My coinage is a take-off, without apology, on “Defining Deviancy
Down”(American Scholar, Winter 1993) by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A cultural
conservative in (patrician) liberal’s clothing, Moynihan left his mark on pop soci-
ology — and bequeathed a handy catchphrase to op-editorialists — with this essay, a
canonical example of the conservative jeremiad about cultural decline. For a well-
argued rebuttal to Moynihan’s essay, see Andrew Karmen, “‘Defining Deviancy
Down’: How Senator Moynihan’s Misleading Phrase About Criminal Justice Is
Rapidly Being Incorporated Into Popular Culture,” Journal of Criminal Justice and
Popular Culture, 2(5) (1994), pp. 99-112, http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol2is5/
deviancy.html.
7 Telephone interview with the author, April 14, 2004. All Barratt quotes are from
this essay.
8 Marx, K. and Engels, F. “The Communist Manifesto”, http://www.marxists.org/ar-
chive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm.
9 “Make Your Dildo Kit”: http://makeyourowndildo.com/info/. “Ultraviolet
Jelly Rubber Butt Beads”: http://www.babeland.com/page/TIB/PROD/butt-
beads/TD250240. “Fleshlight”: http://www.fleshlight.com/main/products.
cfm?id=1001&aff=70398.
10 All facts in this graph from the Planned Parenthood factsheet “Abstinence-Only
‘Sex’ Education (Adapted with permission from the Sex & Censorship Committee,
National Coalition Against Censorship),” at http://www.plannedparenthood.org/li-
brary/facts/AbstinenceOnly10-01.html.
11 Planned Parenthood website, “Abstinence-Only ‘Sex’ Education (Adapted with
permission from the Sex & Censorship Committee, National Coalition Against
Censorship),” http://www.plannedparenthood.org/library/facts/AbstinenceOnly10-
01.html.
12 Planned Parenthood, “Abstinence-Only ‘Sex’ Education,” ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 All quotes from Mubarak S. Dahir, “Lesbian Debauchery in Oklahoma,” AlterNet,
posted October 13, 2004, http://www.alternet.org/rights/20162/, and Frank Rich,
“On ‘Moral Values,’ It’s Blue in A Landslide,” The New York Times, “Arts And Lei-
sure,” November 14, 2004, Section 2, p. 1.

16 Dahir, “Lesbian Debauchery in Oklahoma,” AlterNet, ibid.
17 For more on this subject, see Guy E. Brannon, M.D., “Paraphilias,” at eMedicine.
com, http://www.emedicine.com/med/topic3127.htm.
18 National Academy of Sciences, “Pornography on the Internet,” http://
www4.nas.edu/onpi/webextra.nsf/44bf87db309563a0852566f2006d63bb/
13a0fdabb8339dce85256bac005b4a2f?OpenDocument.
19 See Youth, Pornography, and the Internet, Thornburgh, D. and Lin, H.S. (eds.),
Washington, D.C., National Academy Press, 2002, p. 70, http://www.nap.edu/
books/0309082749/html/70.html.
20 Youth, Pornography, and the Internet, ibid., p. 57, http://www.nap.edu/
books/0309082749/html/57.html.
21 Unbylined post, “She Stuck What in Her Pussy?,” JaxonJaganov.com, posted Au-
gust 23, 2005, http://www.jaxonjaganov.com/Pornblog_08-05.php.
22 Unbylined comments, “Rein’s Bathing Album,” http://lynx.phpwebhosting.com/
~sgroi/rein5/index.html. Relocated to SwimmingFullyClothed.com, http://www.
swimmingfullyclothed.com/.
23 The site’s homepage is at http://www.nbak.tierranet.com/main.htm. Check out the
images at http://www.nbak.tierranet.com/art.htm, http://www.nbak.tierranet.com/
pixs/Nwoods01.jpg, http://www.nbak.tierranet.com/pixs/NeckBrace_01.jpg,
and http://www.nbak.tierranet.com/pixs/Star3.jpg.
24 The site is currently offline, an incalculable loss to fans — and fans of fans— of this
fetish, but there’s an article about Big-Gulp fan fiction at http://members.aol.com/
Ladycyrrh/Websites/big-gulp.html. As well, much of the site is archived, happily,
via the Wayback Machine, at http://web.archive.org/web/20020205224509/www.
casti.com/big-gulp/main/main.html. Don’t miss the awesome gallery of images at
http://web.archive.org/web/20011218044339/www.casti.com/big-gulp/pictures/pix_
main.html.
25 See http://web.archive.org/web/20010610080629/ender.com/~armesti/big-gulp/
head.gif, http://web.archive.org/web/20010610080843/ender.com/~armesti/
big-gulp/bonhomme.jpg, http://web.archive.org/web/20010613213524/
ender.com/~armesti/big-gulp/generousgiant.jpg, http://web.archive.org/
web/20030522094546/http://ender.com/~armesti/big-gulp/20000501_15:35:43_
696.jpg, http://web.archive.org/web/20020213141303/ender.com/~armesti/
big-gulp/GiantBB.GIF.
26 See: http://web.archive.org/web/20010610074533/ender.com/~armesti/big-gulp/
darkmeat.gif.
27 See: http://web.archive.org/web/20010613213557/ender.com/~armesti/big-gulp/gi-
antlou.jpg.
28 See: http://web.archive.org/web/20020205224509/www.casti.com/big-gulp/main/
main.html.
29 Supervert, “Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish,” http://www.supervert.com/etsf/index.html.
148 C’Lick Me
30 Ballard, J.G. Introduction to Crash, http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1996/03/

msg01651.html.
31 Excerpted at the weblog BodyAndSoul, http://bodyandsoul.typepad.com/
blog/2005/03/todays_los_ange.html. In some cases, soldiers traded their photos of
wartime horrors for free access to the X-rated site NowThatsFuckedUp.com; the
site’s owner then posted their images, gloatingly captioned by the soldiers them-
selves, alongside amateur porn. See “War Pornography US soldiers trade grisly pho-
tos of dead and mutilated Iraqis for access to amateur porn. The press is strangely
silent,” by Chris Thompson, East Bay Express, September 21, 2005, http://www.
eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2005-09-21/news/news.html.
32 Excerpted at the weblog BodyAndSoul, http://bodyandsoul.typepad.com/
blog/2005/03/todays_los_ange.html.
33 For examples, see http://archive.salon.com/sex/feature/2001/02/08/saeki/japanese.
html.
34 For examples, see http://www.woodenmen.org/maruo/images/maruo5.jpg.
35 For a brief, informal and not necessarily fact-checked history of bukkake, see http://
www.asianbukkakeshowers.com/. Also see the equally dubious http://www.4-buk-
kake.com/.
36 See: http://www.japan-bukkake.com/japanesebukkake/facialhumiliation.html.
37 See: http://www.classroomtools.com/subad4b.jpg. Mere coincidence, or subliminal
seduction? You be the judge!
38 Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker and David Cook, “Panic Penis,” in Panic Ency-
clopedia (1989), http://www.freedonia.com/panic/penis/penis.html.
39 John Tierney, “Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress,” The New York Times,
January 9, 1994, Section 2 (“Arts & Leisure”), p. 1.
40 Tierney, ibid.
41 David Edelstein, “The Matrix: marshalling art and FX,” The Age, May 25 2003,
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/24/1053585741991.html.
149
Warporn! Warpunk!
Autonomous Videopoiesis in Wartime
Matteo Pasquinelli
Grinning monkeys
How do you think you can stop war without weapons? The anti-war public opinion that
fills squares worldwide and the cosmetic democracy of International Courts stand pow-
erless in front of the raging US military. Against the animal instincts of a superpower
reason cannot prevail: a homicidal force can be arrested only by another, stronger force.
Everyday we witness such a Darwinian show: history repeating itself through a cruel
confrontation of forces, whilst what rests is freedom of speech exercised in drawing-
rooms. Pacifists too are accomplices of instinctive forces, because animal aggressiveness
is inside us all. How do we express that bestiality for which we condemn armies?
Underneath the surface of the self-censorship belonging to the radical left (not only
to the conformist majority), it should be admitted publicly that watching Abu Ghraib pic-
tures of pornographic tortures does not scandalize us, on the contrary, it rather excites us,
in exactly the same way as the obsessive voyeurism that draws us to 9/11 videos. Through
such images we feel the expression of repressed instincts, the pleasure rising again after
being narcotised by consumerism, technologies, goods and images. We show our teeth
as monkeys do, when their aggressive grin looks dreadfully like the human smile. Con-
temporary thinkers as well, like Baudrillard and Žižek, acknowledge a dark side inside
Western culture. If 9/11 has been a shock for Western consciousness, Baudrillard puts
forward a more shocking thesis: we westerners were to desire 9/11, as the death drive of a
superpower that having reached its natural limits, knows and desires nothing more than
self-destruction and war. The indignation is hypocrisy; there is always an animal talking
behind a video screen.
150 C’Lick Me
On the videowar battleground

Before pulling the monkey out of the TV set, we have to focus on the battleground on
which the media match is played. The more reality is an augmentation of mass, person-
al, and networked devices, the more wars become media wars, even if they take place in
a desert. The First Global War started by live–broadcasting the 9/11 air disaster and con-
tinued with video-guerrilla episodes: everyday from the Iraqi front we received videos
shot by invaders, militiamen, and journalists. Every action in such a media war is de-
signed beforehand to fit its spectacular consequences. Terrorists have learnt all the rules
of spectacular conflict while imperial propaganda, much more expert, has no qualms
about playing with fakes and hoaxes (for instance the dossiers on weapons of mass de-
struction). Bureaucratic propaganda wars are a thing of the past. New media has gen-
erated guerrilla combat, opening up a molecular front of bottom-up resistance. Video
cameras among civilians, weblogs updated by independent journalists, smart-phones
used by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison: each represents an uncontrol-
lable variable that can subvert the propaganda apparatus. Video imagery produced by
television is now interlaced with the anarchic self-organised infrastructure of digital net-
worked media that has become a formidable means of distribution (evidenced by the
capillary diffusion of the video of the beheading of Nick Berg). Today’s propaganda is
used to manage a connective imagery rather than a collective spectacle, and the intelli-
gence services set up simulacra of the truth based on networking technologies.
The videoclash of civilizations

Alongside the techno-conflict between horizontal and vertical media, two secular cul-
tures of image face each other on the international mediascape. The United States em-
bodies the last stage of videocracy, an oligarchic technocracy based on hypertrophic
advertising and infotainment, and the colonisation of the worldwide imagery through
Hollywood and CNN. 20th century ideologies such as Nazism and Stalinism were in-
timately linked to the fetishism of the idea-image (as all of western thought is heir to
Platonic idealism). Islamic culture on the contrary is traditionally iconoclast: it is for-
bidden to represent images of God and the Prophet, and usually of any living crea-
ture whatsoever. Only Allah is “Al Mussawir”, he who gives rise to forms: imitating his
gesture of creation is a sin (even if such a precept never appears in the Koran). Islam,
unlike Christianity, has no sacred iconographic centre. In mosques the Kiblah is an
empty niche. Its power comes not from the refusal of the image but from the refusal of
its centralizing role, developing in this way a material, anti-spectacular, and horizontal
cult. Indeed, on Doomsday, painters are meant to suffer more than other sinners. Even
if modernisation proceeds through television and cinema (that paradoxically did not
have the same treatment of painting), iconoclastic ground remains active and breaks out
against western symbols, as happened in the case of the World Trade Centre. To strike
at western idolatry, pseudo-Islamic terrorism becomes videoclasm, preparing attacks de-
signed for live broadcasting and using satellite channels as a resonant means for its pro-
paganda. Al-Jazeera broadcasts images of shot-dead Iraqi civilians, whilst western mass
media removes these bodies in favour of the military show. An asymmetrical imagery is
developing between East and West, and it will be followed by an asymmetrical rage, that
will break out with backlashes for generations to come. In such a clash between videoc-
racy and videoclasm, a third actor, the global movement, tries to open a breach and de-
velop therein an autonomous videopoiesis. The making of an alternative imagery is not
only based on self-organising independent media, but also on winning back the dimen-
sion of myth and the body. Videopoiesis should speak — at the same time — to the belly
and to the brain of the monkeys.
Global video-brain
Western media and awareness was woken up by the physical force of live-broadcasted
images not by the news of tortures at the Abu Ghraib prison or of Nick Berg’s behead-
ing. Television is the medium that taught the masses a Pavlovian reaction to images.
It is also the medium that produced the globalisation of the collective mind (some-
thing more complex than the idea of public opinion). The feelings of the masses have
been always reptilian: what media proliferation established is a video mutation of feel-
ings, a becoming-video of the collective brain and of collective narration. The global
video-brain functions through images, whereas our brains think out of images. This is
not about crafting a theory, but recognising the natural extension of our faculties. Elec-
tronic and economic developments move at too high a speed for the collective mind
to have time to communicate and elaborate messages in speech, there is only time for
reacting to visual stimuli. A collective imagery arises when a media infrastructure casts
and repeats the same images in a million copies, producing a common space; a con-
sensual hallucination around the same object (that afterwards is spread through other
channels from word-of-mouth to the film industry). In the case of the TV medium, such
a serial communication of a million images is much more lethal, because it is instanta-
neous. On the other hand, the networked imagery works in an interactive and non-in-
stantaneous way, this is why we call it connective imagery. Imagery is a collective serial
broadcasting of the same image across different media. According to Goebbels, it is a
lie repeated a million times that becomes public discourse, part of everyday conversa-
tions, and then accepted truth. Collective imagery is the place where media and desire
meet each other, where the same repeated image modifies millions of bodies simultane-
ously and inscribes pleasure, hope and fear. Communication and desire, mediasphere
and psychosphere, are the two axis that describe the war to the global mass, the way in
which the war reaches our bodies far from the real conflict and the way image inscribes
itself into the flesh.
Animal narrations
Why does reality exist only when framed by a powerful TV network? Why is the course
of events affected by the evening news? Collective imagery is not affected by the video
evolution of mass technologies only, but also by the natural instincts of human kind. As
a political animal (Aristotle), the human being is inclined to set up collective narratives,
152 C’Lick Me
that represent the instinct of belonging to its own kind. Let’s call them animal narra-
tives. For this reason television is a ‘natural’ medium, because it responds to the need
of creating one narrative for millions of people, a single animal narrative for entire na-
tions, similarly to what other narrative genres, like the epic, the myth, the Bible and the
Koran, did and still do. Television represents, above all else, the ancestral feeling to be-
long to one Kind, that is, the meta-organism we all belong to. Each geopolitical area has
its own video macro-attractor (CNN, BBC etc.), which the rest of the media relate to.
Beside the macro-attractors, there are meta-attractors, featuring the role of critical con-
sciousness against them, a function often held by press and web media (the Guardian,
for instance). Of course the model is much more complex: the list could continue and
end with blogs, which we can define as group micro-attractors, the smallest in scale, but
suffice to say here that the audience and power of the main attractor are ensured by the
natural animal instinct. This definition of mass media might seem strange, because they
are no longer push media that communicate in unidirectional ways (one-to-many), but
pull media that attract and group together; media in which we invest our desires (many-
to-one). Paraphrasing Reich’s remark on fascism, we can say that rather than the masses
being brainwashed by the media establishment, the latter is sustained and desired by the
perversion of the desire to belong.
Digital anarchy. A videophone vs. Empire

Traditional media war incorporates the Internet and the networked imagery (with televi-
sion, Internet, mobile phones and digital cameras) turns into a battle ground: personal
media such as digital cameras bring the cruelty of war directly into the living room, for
the first time in history at the speed of an Internet download and out of any governmen-
tal control. This networked imagery cannot be stopped, and neither can technological
evolution. Absolute transparency is an inevitable fate for all of us. The video phone
era seriously undermines privacy, as well as any kind of secrecy, state secrecy included.
Rumsfeld’s vented outrage in front of US Senate Committee on Armed Services about
the scandal at Abu Ghraib is extremely grotesque: “We’re functioning… with peacetime
constraints, with legal requirements, in a wartime situation, in the Information Age,
where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable
photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise,
when they had — they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.” A few days later, Rums-
feld prohibited the use of any kind of camera or videophone to the American soldiers in
Iraq. Rumsfeld himself was the ‘victim’ of the Internet broadcasting of a famous video
that shows him politely shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983. New digital me-
dia seem to have created an unpredictable digital anarchy, where a video phone can
fight against Empire. The images of torture at Abu Ghraib are the internal nemesis of
a civilization of machines that is running out of control of its creators and demiurges.
There is a machine nemesis but also an image nemesis: as Baudrillard notes, the Em-
pire of the Spectacle is now submitted to the hypertrophy of the Spectacle itself, to its
own greed for images, to an auto-erotic pornography. The infinitely repeatable charac-
ter of digital technology allowed for the demise of the copyright culture through P2P
networks, but also for the proliferation of digital spam and the white noise of contents
on the web. Video phones have created a networked mega-camera, a super-light pan-
opticon, a horizontal Big Brother. The White House was trapped in this web. Digital
repetition no longer delivers us to the game of mirrors of Postmodern weak thought — to
the image as self-referential simulacrum — but rather to an interlinked universe where
videopoiesis can connect the farthest points and cause fatal short circuits.
War porn
Indeed, what came to light with the Abu Ghraib media scandal was not a casual short-
circuit, but the implosion into a deadly vortex of war, media, technology, body, desire.
Philosophers, journalists and commentators from all sides rushed to deliver different
perspectives for a new framework of analysis. The novelty of the images of Abu Ghraib
and Nick Berg (whether fictional or not is not the point) consists in the fact that they
forged a new narrative genre of collective imagery. For the first time, a snuff movie was
projected onto the screen of global imagery and Internet subcultures, used to such im-
ages, suddenly came out of the closet: Rotten.com finally reached the masses. Rather
than making sense of a traumatic experience, newspapers and weblogs worldwide are
engaged in drawing out the political, cultural, social and aesthetic repercussions of a
new genre of image that forces us to upgrade our immunity system and communicative
strategies. As Seymour Hersh noted, Rumsfeld provided the world with a good excuse to
ignore the Geneva Convention from now on. But he lowered the level of tolerance of
the visible as well, forcing us to accept cohabitation with the Horror. Anglo-American
journalism has defined warporn through journalism popular tabloid and government
talk-shows which fetishise super-sized weapons and well-polished uniforms, hi-tech
tanks and infrared-guided bombs: a panoplia of images that some define as the asep-
tic substitute of pornography proper. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down is war hardcore,
to name one. The cover of Time, where an American soldier was chosen as ‘Person of
the Year,’ was defined pure war porn by Adbusters: “Three American Soldiers standing
proudly, half-smiles playing on their faces, rifles cradled in their arms.” War porn is also
a sub-genre of trash porn — still relatively unknown, coming from the dark side of the
net. It simulates violent sex scenes between soldiers or the rape of civilians (pseudo-ama-
teur movies usually shot in Eastern Europe and often passed as real). War porn is freed
from its status of net subculture: its morbid interest and fetish for war imagery become
political weapons, voyeurism and the nightmares of the masses. Is it a coincidence that
war porn emerges from the Iraqi marshes right at this time?
Digital-body rejection
The metaphorical association of war with sex that underpins much Anglo-American
journalism, points to something deeper that was never before made so explicit: a libido
that, alienated by wealth, awaits war to give free reign to its ancestral instincts. War is as
old as the human species: natural aggressiveness is historically embodied in collective
154 C’Lick Me
and institutional forms, but several layers of technology have separated today’s war from
its animal substratum. We needed Abu Ghraib pictures to bring to the surface the ob-
scene background of animal energy which lies underneath a democratic make-up. Did
this historic resurfacing of the repressed occur today simply because of the mass spread-
ing of digital cameras and video phones? Or is there a deeper connection between the
body and technology bound to prove to be deadly sooner or later? As the mass media
are filled with tragic and morbid news, the framing of digital media seems to be miss-
ing something from its inception. This could be that passion of the real (Alain Badiou)
which, exiled onto the screen, explodes out of control. New personal media are directly
connected to the psychopathology of everyday living, we might say that they create a
new format for it and a new genre of communication, but above all, they establish a re-
lation with the body that television never had. War porn seems to signal the rejection of
technology by subconscious forces that express themselves through the same medium
that represses them: this rejection might point to the ongoing adaptation of the body to
the digital. Proliferation of digital prostheses is not as rational, aseptic and immaterial
as it seems. Electronic media seemed to have introduced technological rationality and
coolness into human relations, yet the shadows of the digital increasingly re-surface.
There comes a point when technology physically unbridles its opposite. The Internet
is the best example: behind the surface of the immaterial and disembodied technology
lies a traffic of porn content that takes up half of its daily band-width. At the same time,
the Orwellian proliferation of video cameras, far from producing and Apollonian world
of transparency, is ridden with violence, blood and sex. The next Endemol Big Brother
will resemble the film Battle Royal, where Takeshi Kitano forces a class of students on
an island and into a game of death where the winner is the last survivor. We have always
considered the media as a prosthesis of human rationality, and technology as the new
embodiment of the logos. But new media also embodies the dark side of the Western
world. In war porn we found this Siamese body made up of libido and media, desire and
image. Two radical movements that are the same movement: war reinvests the alienated
libido, personal media are filled by the desperate libido they alienated. The subcon-
scious can not lie, the skeletons sooner or later start knocking on the closet door.
Imagery reset
War results from the inability to dream after depleting all libidinal energy in an outflow
of prostheses, commodities and images. War violence forces us to believe again in im-
ages of everyday life, images of the body as well as images of advertising. War is an imag-
ery reset. War brings the attention and excitement for advertising back to a zero degree,
where advertising can start afresh. War saves advertising from the final annihilation of
the orgasm, from the nirvana of consumption, the inflation and indifference of values.
War brings the new economy back to the old economy, to traditional and consolidated
commodities, it gets rid of immaterial commodities that risk dissolving the economy into
a big potlatch and into the anti-economy of the gift that the Internet represents. War has
the ‘positive’ effect of redelivering us to ‘radical’ thought, to the political responsibil-
ity of representation, against the interpretative flights of ‘weak thought,’ of semiotics

and postmodernism (where postmodernism is the western image looking for an alibi to
its own impotence). The pornographic images of war, as we said, are the reflux of the
animal instinct that our economic and social structure has repressed. But rather than a
psychoanalysis that reactively justifies new customs and fashions, we seek to carry out a
‘physical’ analysis of libidinal energy. In wartime we see images re-emerge with a new
autonomous and autopoietic force. There are different kinds of image: war porn images
are not representations, they speak directly to the body, they are a cruel, lucid and af-
firmative force, like Artaud’s theatre, they are re-magnetised images that do not provoke
incredulity, they are neural icons running on the spinal motorways, as Ballard would
put it. Radical images redeliver the body to us, radical images are bodies, not simulacra.
Their effect is first physical then cognitive. “The movement-image and the flux-matter
are rigorously one and the same thing” (Deleuze). The damned tradition of the image is
back, with the psychic and contagious power of Artaud’s theatre, a machinic image that
joins together the material and the immaterial, body and dream. “Fiction is a branch of
neurology” (Ballard). In a libidinal explosion, war porn liberates the animal energies of
Western society like a bomb. Such energies can be expressed through fascist reactions as
well as liberating revolts. Radical images are images that are still capable of being politi-
cal, in the strong sense of the word, and they can have an impact on the masses that is
simultaneously political, aesthetic and carnal.
Videopoiesis: the body-image

How can we make an intelligent use of television? The first intelligent reaction is to
switch it off. Activists collective such as Adbusters.org (Canada) and Esterni.org (Italy)
organize yearly TV strikes, promoting a day or a week’s abstinence from television. Can
Western society think without television? It cannot. Even if we were to stop watching
TV because of a worldwide black-out or a nuclear war, our imagery, hopes and fears
would carry on thinking within a televised brainframe. This is not about addiction, the
video is simply our primary collective language: once upon a time there was religion,
mythology, epic and literature. We can repress the ritual (watching TV) but we cannot
repress the myth. We can switch television off, but not our imagery. For this reason the
idea of an autonomous videopoiesis is not about the practice of alternative information,
but about new mythical devices for the collective imagery. In its search for the Perfect
Image — that is, the image that is capable of stopping the War, subverting Empire and
starting the Revolution the global movement has theorised and practiced video activism
(from Indymedia to street TVs) and mythopoiesis (from Luther Blissett to San Precario).
However, it never tried to merge those strategies into a videopoiesis capable of challeng-
ing Bin Laden, Bush, Hollywood and the CNN at the level of myth, a videopoiesis for
new icons and formats, like for instance the video sequences of William Gibson’s Pat-
ter recognition distributed on the net. Videopoiesis does not mean the proliferation of
cameras in the hands of activists, but the creation of video narratives, a new design of
genres and formats rather than alternative information. The challenge lies in the body-
156 C’Lick Me
image. Through videopoiesis we have to welcome the repressed desires of the global
movement and open the question of the body, buried under a para-catholic and third-
worldist rhetoric. While Western imagery is being filled with the dismembered bodies
of heroes, the global movement is still uneasy about its desires. War porn is a challenge
for the movement not to equal the horror but to produce images that awaken and tar-
get the sleepy body. Throughout its history, television has always produced macro-bod-
ies, mythical giant bodies magnified by media power, bodies as cumbersome as Ancient
Gods. The television regime creates monsters, hypertrophic bodies such as the image of
the President of the Unites States, the Al-Qaeda brand and film stars, while the net and
personal media try to dismember them and produce new bodies out of their carcasses.
Videopoiesis must eliminate the unconscious self-censorship that we find in the most
liberal and radical sections of society, the self-censorship that, behind a crypto-catholic
imagery, hides the grin of the monkey. Once crypto-religious self-censorship is eliminat-
ed, videopoiesis can begin its creative reassembly of dismembered bodies.
Warpunk. I like to watch!

Watching cruel images is good for you. What the Western world needs is to stare at its
own shadows. In Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, war news and violent scenes improve
adults’ sexual activity and the condition of psychotic children. Warlords are filling the
collective imagery with brute force. Why leave them to do it in peace? If in the real
world we are always victims of the blackmail of non-violence, in the realm of imagery
and imagination we can feed our wet dreams at last. If American imagery is allowing
a drift towards Nazism and is offering an apology and justification for any kind of vio-
lence, our response can only be an apology of resistance and action, that is warpunk.
Warpunk is not a delirious subculture that embraces weapons in an aesthetic gesture.
On the contrary, it uses radical images as weapons of legitimate defense. To paraphrase
a Japanese saying, warpunk steals from war and empire the art of embellishing death.
Warpunk uses warporn in a tragic way, to overcome Western culture and the self-cen-
sorship of its counter-culture. Above all we are afraid of the hubris of the American war-
lords, of the way they face any obstacle stepping over all written and unwritten rules.
What is the point of confronting this threat with the imagery of the victim, that holds up
to the sky hands painted in white? Victimhood is a bad adviser: it is the definitive valida-
tion of Nazism, the sheep’s baa that makes the wolf even more indifferent. The global
movement is quite a good example of “weak thought” and reactive culture. Perhaps this
is because, unlike warlords and terrorists, it never developed a way of thinking about
the tragic, war, violence and death. A tragic thought is the gaze that can dance on any
image of the abyss. In Chris Korda’s I like to watch video (download available on www.
churchofeuthanasia.org) porn scenes of oral sex and masturbation are mixed with those
of football and baseball matches, and with well-known NY 9/11 images. The phallic
imagery reaches the climax: the Pentagon is hit by an ejaculation, multiple erections
are turned into the NY 9/11 skyline, the Twin Towers themselves become the object of
an architectural fellatio. This video is the projection of the lowest instincts of American
society, of the common ground that bind spectacle, war, pornography and sport. It is
an orgy of images that shows to the West its real background. Warpunk is a squadron of
B52s throwing libidinal bombs and radical images into the heart of Western imagery.
159
Pornographic Coding
Florian Cramer and Stewart Home
“Program code is like pornography. It has linear logic, but no meaning. There is an
accumulation of things already known. The focus is always on the same explicit facts.
Repetition and boredom rule.”
(Adapted from a Neoist slogan)
“Art is sanctioned pornography.”

(Neoist slogan)
We demand a shamanic pornography

Capitalist “progress” destroys the imagination through a frenzy of the visible. What we
see we no longer need to imagine. A famous zero from the popsicle academy was once
moved to write that every time a man had an erection it was a triumph of the imagina-
tion. Power to the imagination, and to sex – for they are one and the same thing. Por-
nographers of the world close your eyes. You have nothing to lose but your bodily fluids!
It is time to decondition ourselves by going beyond the known world.
There are the shamans of old ingested psychedelic mushrooms, while today we are
further armed with a battery of chemically synthesised drugs including ecstasy and LSD.
These psychedelics are psychic elevators that can power us through the seven levels of
human consciousness. The first four levels of consciousness can be reached in ordinary
everyday life. Level Five requires either chemical assistance, or long hours of arduous
interaction with your computer, and when you hit this level, sexual activity is vastly en-
hanced. Once you go above Level Five consciousness you don’t necessarily need coitus.
Indeed, at Level Six you are telepathic and sexually combined with your fellow hack-
160 C’Lick Me
ers, and this integration is even greater at Level Seven (aka total fucking zero and one
pornography).
Drugs and code are the ancient and modern tools with which we can investigate our
own minds while turning our bodies into one vast erogenous zone. Our message to pur-
veyors of representational porn is: HANDS OFF (OUR) EJACULATIONS (both male
and female). WE WANT TO CUM IN ALL THE COLOURS OF ALL THE FLAGS
OF ALL THE CONSULATES. As an initiated shaman, Jean Cocteau was able to come
through the sheer power of his imagination, he could do this without using his hands to
manipulate his genitals. Let’s keep our hands free to impute data on our computer ter-
minals, and use the convulsive power of codes to bring us to orgasm.
Pornography as popular computing

The effectiveness of art is generally hard to judge. Pornography as an art creates ec-
static perception, triggering arousal only through symbolic codes. Cybersex is by no
means new, porn is its oldest device. Computation and programming have likewise
been known in pornography for centuries. In The 120 Days of Sodom, Sade imagines a
ceaseless execution of coded game rules. There is no single point of originality, but only
combinations computed out of a set of sex partners and their organs. Porn as speculative
programming has been long neglected. Along the lines of .walk by socialfiction.org, we
demand psychogeographical computers built from pornographic imagination and sha-
manic sex acts.
Carl van Bolen, author of The History of Eroticism (1966), and Eduard Fuchs, author
of The History of Erotic Art (1922), coin a programming language of Greek-Latin terms
for those combinations. But only with modern day commercial pornography do those
exhaustive computations became real. A mainstream porn video shop like Erotic Video
Service in Berlin with its 24,000 tapes and DVDs for rent: www.evs-video.de, could be
called a pornographic Library of Babel, based on a brute force algorithm of sheer masses
of data. The poets of the French Oulipo group, the “workshop of potential literature,”
which from the 1960s onwards explored algorithmics and formal restraints in writing, an-
nounced a chapter for pornography, Oupornpo, but this seems to have remained a dirty
old man’s joke. Contemporary writer Simon Strong makes up for it in his forthcoming
novel 66mindfuck99 for which he created “a list of criteria defining legal and extra-legal
sex acts,” arranging them with help of a spreadsheet to what he calls “an optimal set of
erotic episodes.”
Does the potential of pornography exhaust itself in the simple mechanics of sexual
combinations? Surely not, although we want to show that it is too easy to sweepingly de-
nounce this approach. Through its minimal variations in endless repetition, it is clear
that pornography has become purely parodic, in other words, that each pornographic
coupling, scene and image becomes the parody of another, or the same in a deceptive
form. Ever since pornography started to circulate, an effort at total identification has been
made, because each pornographic detail ties one operation to another. All pornography
would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the
tracings of Ariadne’s thread leading pornographic codes into their own labyrinth. But
their coupling is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I
AM PORNOGRAPHIC, an integral erection results, because the mere verb “to be” is
the vehicle of sexual frenzy.
Pornography in Stewart Home’s fiction

I included large chunks of repetitive pornography in novels such as Blow Job and Cunt
because few publishers would consider putting out books of fiction that were less than
sixty thousand words long. By including essentially the same pornographic scene on
every other page I only needed to write about thirty thousand words. Bergson claimed
that repetition was the basis of all humour, and I certainly found using it as a device to
expand my books to a length that was acceptable to the publishing industry, and side-
splittingly funny. I was also convinced that if anyone was sexually aroused by my porno-
graphic material (some of which was lifted directly from out-of-copyright sources) then
that was a tremendous achievement. It’s a demonstration of shamanic power to be able
to laugh and have an orgasm at the same time. The imagery I used in my early novels
was shamanic too, it was conceived as a revelation of the true nature and scope of the
unconscious, a sudden shift away from the standpoint of the atomised individual to the
point of view of the entire cosmic movement: a ‘timeless psychedelic moment’ in which
the universe is experienced in the act of waking up and becoming aware of itself. One
could find the beginnings of the cosmic metaphors I used in pulp fiction, where char-
acters having sex might be described as no longer in control of their bodies because ‘the
DNA had taken over.’ I sought to extend such imagery until it was on a par with the vi-
sions of the shamans of old. In order to do this, I would write about DNA codes being
scrambled and unscrambled across the muscular structure structure of my bulk, about
the sexual act leading me to imagine myself as the first amphibian to emerge from the
sea and feel the warmth of the sun on my back, about genetically encoded memoires of
the first star exploding and about being out on the mudflats of pre-history…
The eroticism of boredom

I.I.I.I am. My identity. Mine. I exchange it with another and step outside where the sun
is shining. Another person walks up to me and gives me some words. I respond by giving
her some pleasure I have with me.
If you use words often enough they become interchangeable. Infinity, limitation,
enthusiasm, depression, imagination, concretion. Give me back pleasure. I need to get
more words with it. Chasing your mind’s tail, the back of your image unfolds into warm
breeze. Throaty sound and smell of petal marshland. Five minute stare into the eyes of
another being. Breaking the silence, I say “I wanna go down on you.” Stepping back and
removing pleasure, giving words. Is this porn?
Pornography. The mind is pornographic. I shape the word “cunt” in it, only to prove
to myself that there is obscenity. Cities, streets, romantic dreams of the perfect dirty im-
162 C’Lick Me
age flickering like a single frame of film. Slow down the projection and blink while you
watch it.
Pornography in dreams
Pornography in dreams
Pornography in books
Pornography in cars
Pornography in advertising
And everywhere repression
Repressed living as the expression of everyday life
Free your mind and your ass will follow
Pick it up, let it move, make it happen
Go with the code
Arm yourself with drugs, magic and computing
Fuck with fucking and drift into abstraction
Zeros and ones turn me on
Pornography in computing
Computing has been sexual ever since John von Neumann, the creator of modern-day
computer architecture, conceived of self-replicating automata. Nowadays, they translate
into computer viruses and the rhetoric of preventing infection uses the same concepts
and terminology as rhetoric about preventing sexually transmitted diseases. Computer
users know that the electronic message “I love you” is just as true as its non-electronic
equivalent, meaning in reality “I want to fuck with you.”
If codes can fuck your computer, where’s the porn that depicts them?
Porn, of course, flows through computers in abundance, and software has been adapt-
ed to it. The Linux-based image and video display program “pornview” is, according to its
manual, optimized “for unattended presentation of images for hands-free viewing.”
DVD videos can have multiple camera angles, a technical feature created to cater to
the porn industry and its customers. The image rendering component of the free Mozilla
browser was originally called “libpr0n,” “pr0n” being hacker code speak for “porn.” An-
other GNU/Linux program, “driftnet” taps into a local computer network, and displays
all images that co-workers are currently browsing. The developers of the program rec-
ommend that “if you are possessed of Victorian sensibilities, and share an unswitched
network with others who are not, you should probably not use it.”
But in these examples, the pornography remains outside the software itself. Obscen-
ity on program code level exists, too, but doesn’t necessarily render the running software
obscene or pornographic. The Linux kernel, for example, contains the word “fuck” 56
times in its sourcecode:
[Sorry. Ignored \begin{small} … \end{small}]
But Linux hardly fucks anything in operation. Another example of non-operational

code-level pornography is the ASCII pr0n genre, pornographic images drawn as typo-
grams:
/’ `\/ `.
. .’ : `. `.
\\.’ , `.` `.
`. ,___/|\. `. :
. \, ..’/ ‘ ‘\ , ‘
.\ . \_.~ _; ; \/.’
`\ …_`. : /.. ../
/’ _._ \. ~ .’ `\:
/.’’@ ` .---. `.
.’ : ‘ @ `.\. \
/ ./`.._./ ~ . :\ `. __
.’ / ( \….’ `. .’ /’ `.
/’’’\ .’ `. / \ : ;’ .’ ..:
.’ ; `\; : : : : .’ : ; :
: `\. `\. ; : \.’ “ ‘ ;
`. `. \ / s . / `. .’
` . `. `\ `. ; /’ ;___ ;
`. `. `. ` ; ;:__..’
`. `. `. :` ‘: _.’ .’ ; :
`. `. .\x./-`--…../’ ; :
`. ..-:..-’ ( :
`---’`. `; :
`. `,.. : :
`. `. `.___;
`. `.
`. `;
`-.,’
Originally a hack to bring visual pornography into the world of alphanumerical comput-
er terminals, they became ironic retro chic in 1990s net art, above all in “Deep ASCII,”
a typographic rendering of the movie “Deep Throat.”1
“Prograsm,” which the hacker “Jargon File” defines as the “euphoria experienced
upon the completion of a program or other computer-related project,” is another exam-
ple of ecstasy outside the running program. However, a concept of prograsm that involves
the code and the process has existed since the Middle Ages in ecstatic Kabbalah. The
oldest known kabbalistic book Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation) contains mathematical
combinatorics, and Kabbalists like Abraham Abulafia practiced computational readings
of the Torah as a sexually ecstatic technique. In an 18th century autobiography, Salomon
164 C’Lick Me
Maimon tells us how he learnt that:
“the name Jehova represents […] the person of the Godhead generis masculini, while
the word Koh means […] the person of the Godhead generis feminini, and the word
Amar denotes sexual union. The words ’Koh amar Jehovah,’ ’Thus saith the Lord,’ I
therefore explained as follows: […] an actual union of these divine spouses took place
from which the whole world might expect a blessing.”
In other words, the Kabbalah imagines God as able to fuck himself by the virtue of his
male and female attributes, in the medium of the words put down in the Torah. The
Torah becomes pornographic writing, a code whose execution generates divine physi-
cal arousal.
Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, can be read as another
auto-erotic obscene and pornographic mechanism, secularised however as modern art.
Still more secularised are the corresponding technologies that exist in computing today,
such as the “Brainfuck” programming language and program code recursion code ex-
ecuting itself in strange loops, a key structure among others in the programming language
LISP. While this code is, by its nature, a pure formalism, its coupling is no less irritat-
ing than the copulation of bodies. When I scream I AM THE PROGRAM, an integral
erection results, because the verb ‘to be’ is the vehicle of obscene frenzy, bastardising the
formalism of the software and my informal being to a dirty code.
Reroute via gender strippage [simple cognitive shift allocation], strip to the violence
inducer core and wipe with a pseudo stroke. Instruction: Regenderate the Mis][s][User.
Towards an Open Source Pornography

Richard Kern: Suicide Girls is a mystery to me because I thought only women ran
the site.
Daniel Robert Epstein: Does that make a difference?
Richard Kern: I had heard from various models from there that my type was not liked
there because I was a guy exploiting women and SuicideGirls is a feminist site. No mat-
ter what anyone says, its still naked girls and still guys checking them out. There are
girls checking in also but a lot of guys too. It’s the same thing no matter how you cut it.2
No doubt, indie porn is the pornography of this decade, if not of the whole century.
Beyond that, it appears to be the first significant new cultural movement of the millen-
nium. It has replaced net.art as the aesthetic avant-garde of the Internet. Websites like
Suicidegirls.com, Cleansheets.com, ThatStrangeGirl.com and FatalBeauty.com com-
bine the punk styling of their models with visual punk aesthetics and do-it-yourself punk
attitude.3 The site IndieNudes.com, lists more related sites and resources.4 It thus seems
as if there is finally a non-industrial and erotically imaginative pornography for hetero-
and bisexuals, after the avant-garde of lesbian and gay pornography had reached the
same level already in the early 1990s, with magazines like On Our Backs and porn video
labels like Cazzo Productions.
In reality, indie porn is just like indie pop. It pretends to be different from the indus-
try, but works with the same business model. Just as punk and indie pop saved the music
industry in the 1980s and 1990s, indie porn will save the porn industry of today. It is the
research and development arm of the porn industry. An industry that otherwise would go
bankrupt because everyone freely shares its products on the Internet.5
Figure 1. Sample image from sucidegirls.com
Most indie porn sites are based on software and editorial formats created in indepen-
dent net cultures, most of all, weblogs. Central to the aesthetics of indie porn is a concept
of the authentic. Not only are the models unmodified by surgery (except for tattoos and
piercings) and Photoshop. They are also accessible in chats, personal blogs and home-
pages: a key feature of most indie porn sites. They thus produce a simulacrum of the
“real” that is no different from the popular genre of industrial pseudo amateur pornogra-
phy. The rough look and production values of indie porn not only simulates authenticity,
it’s also a means of cutting production costs and outsourcing labor when, for example on
the site IShotMyself.com, the models become their own photographers.
Glamour and synthetic cyber pornography as well as hentai anime are more radi-
cal than indie porn because they show sexual alienation openly and make no attempt at
clouding the fact that authentic moments can’t be found in them. Just like mainstream
pop star Michael Jackson is ultimately more subversive than The Manic Street Preachers,
commercial pornography is superior to indie porn because it offers less for the imagina-
tion to work with. By offering more variation in the imagery, indie porn preempts, and
Figure 2. Sample image from nofauxxx.com
Figure 3. Dahlia Schweitzer, “Lovergirl” photo series, nofauxxx.com

thereby erodes imagination. A digital pornography that would strive for true honesty and
imagination should reduce, rather than increase, its visual imagination. In the end, it
should present itself as nothing but code, teaching us to get off on mere zeros and ones,
thus overcoming the false dichotomy of the artificial and the authentic.
Against commercial indie porn we demand a truly independent, open source por-
nography. Pornography should be made by all: a radically populist pornography of col-
lectively produced, purely formal codes. This pornography will reconcile rationality and
instinct and overcome alienation because the codes will have to be reconstituted into
sexual imaginations by the right side of brain. Software, reconceived as a dirty code cross-
bred of formalism and subjectivity, will be the paradigm of this pornography, a code that
sets processes into motion.6
This paper was first given at Crash Conference, 11 February 2005, and is reproduced here
with the permission of the authors.
notes
1 by the ASCII Art Ensemble around Vuc Cosic and Luka Frelih.
2 Richard Kern interviewed by Daniel Robert Epstein, http://suicidegirls.com/words/
Richard+Kern/
3 http:///www.nerve.com is a highbrow forerunner of these sites, creating “sophistic-
ated” porn for an intellectual audience.
4 The sites www.ishotmyself.com and www.beautifulagony.com, straightforwardly
translate avant-garde art concepts into porn business models; the former features
models who take pictures of themselves, the latter plagiarises Andy Warhol’s film
Blow Job by merely showing faces of persons who have an orgasm.
5 Richard Kern says about mainstream porn magazines in the same interview: “I shoot
for them only occasionally now because that business isn’t what it used to be. […] A
lot of the point mags are going out of business. They dropped the pay tremendously
and its all because of the Internet. I used to go out once a month to LA and shoot for
one week. I’d make a ton of money then come back to New York and do whatever I
wanted.”
6 A rare example of such dirty porn code are the writings of the Australian codework
artist mez.
Figure 4. An open source porn coder
Figure 5. Turning her image into code increases its shamanistic pornographic quality
Figure 6. Further pornographic enhancement
Figure 7. Pornographic perfection

171
Sodom Blogging:
Alternative porn and
aesthetic sensibility
Florian Cramer
Indie porn represents a currently flourishing sub-genre of pornography, in which well-

known looks from subcultures such as Gothic or Punk are oftentimes staged as anti-
commercial, feminist gestures of self-empowerment. In this regard, the conflicts that
shaped the debates around pornography’s obscenity from the sixites onwards are how-
ever avoided in favour of alternative sexual aesthetics — pornography thus loses one of its
basic features. But can there ever be pornography beyondthe obscene?
The contradiction of all pornography is that it destroys the obscene. Like the beauti-
ful for classicism, the sublime for Dark Romanticism and the ugly for the grotesque, the
obscene is porn’s aesthetic register, its aura and its selling point. Sade invents modern
pornography as the discourse of art crosses a historical threshold from rule-based poiesis
to the sensitive aisthesis. Les 120 jours de Sodome, illustrates precisely this clash of cul-
tures: a gang of perpetrators, old aristocrats who combine and choreograph their orgies
according to the rules of poetics; a group of victims, young children from the bourgeoi-
sie, whose sensibilities unmask the debauchery as perversion in the first place; resulting
in a mutual escalation of poiesis and aisthesis, construction and sentiment, machine and
body. Conceptualism and performance, the antagonistic and complementary poles of
modern art, are already fully developed here, and their conjunction of the pornographic
and the mechanical will be taken up again in Duchamp’s Large Glass and Schwitters’
Merzbau, patrician sex-machine construction and petit-bourgeois sensitive “cathedral of
erotic misery.”
That the pornographic logic of the taboo on obscenity cancels itself nowhere more
thoroughly than in pornography itself, is demonstrated exemplarily by the performances
of Annie Sprinkle. An actress in seventies mainstream porn who became an Action art-
172 C’Lick Me
ist and “alternative porn” pioneer, she not only transgresses generic boundaries but also
turns the classical imagery of heterosexual pornography on its head. With her ritual invi-
tation to the audience to see into her vagina by means of a speculum, Sprinkle concludes
the iconographic tradition of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1886) and Duchamp’s
Etant donnés (posthumous, 1968), but disarms the previously lewd gaze, and as an agent
of both sexual education and enlightenment, exorcises both the taboo and the sexual
mystery from such display. Speaking of an obscene “heft of language” and discovering
“in a word such as ‘cunt’ […] great power,”1 writer Kirsten Fuchs indicates not only the
taboo of Indie porn discourses which defuse this heft, but also the failure of industrial por-
nography to reproduce it. Sade, whose systematically constructed escalations blunt the
consumer’s sensibilities just like any mainstream pornography, attempts to save the taboo
by carrying his excesses to the extreme of ritual murder, a figure of thought, Romantic
and sentimentalist at its core, which lives on in the “urban legends” of performance art
suicides of Rudolf Schwarzkogler and John Fare, and is physically performed, in a race
against the Zeitgeist, in Genesis P. Orridge’s modifications of his body.
The “exploitation” of the porn viewer consists in the false promise of obscenity, or its
simulation—as Gonzo porn has done since John Stagliano’s “Buttman” series — through
the aggressive penetration and protrusion of bodies.2 Yet this is precisely where main-
stream and independent pornography, the business and the activism of porn meet: Sprin-
kle’s performances are Gonzo with the addition of a feminist “empowerment” which
returns the object of such protrusion to the position of the subject. And the independent
pornography which has recently established itself as a genre, mostly on the Internet,
but flanked by sexually explicit auteur movies such as 9 songs and Shortbus, can be the
subject of a discussion free of bad conscience because, among other reasons, it presents
“good” sex without obscenity; fulfilling, after the interventions of the feminist anti-porn
debate of the 1980s, Peter Gorsen’s diagnosis of a neo-vitalist tendency in contemporary
sexual aesthetics that consummate the program of turn-of-the-century anti-industrialisa-
tion and Naturist movements.3
Thus, the boundaries are blurred between the pornographic exploitation of codes
from subcultures and artistic experimentation on the one hand, and the sub-cultural ap-
propriation of pornographic codes on the other hand. The Australian porn holding gm-
bill.com hosts “Project ISM” at ishotmyself.com, a simulated conceptual art project by
women who photograph themselves, and beautifulagony.com, a website _ the eroticism
is quite successful _ exclusively devoted to close-up videos of men’s and women’s faces
during sex and orgasm, thus serialising the concept behind Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, in
recursive application of Warhol’s aesthetic to itself. The milieu’s, roles and interests of
art, and commercial enterprise of artists and sex workers, of sex industry and cultural criti-
cism seem to blend into each other: the photo models and sex performers at SuicideGirls.
com or AbbyWinters.com discuss feminist literature seminars, artist Dahlia Schweitzer
is at once Electropunk singer, author, former call girl, photography artist and her own
nude model with a college degree in Women’s Studies; while the humanities in turn ap-
proach the subject as participant observers in Porn Studies and at recent “netporn” and
“post porn politics” conferences.

The price for such integration is the avoidance of all conflict. Whether as a provoca-
tion, as an expression of the power of sex or of sexual politics _ what is thus liquidated, the
obscene, was what marked the points of intersection between the experimental arts and
commercial pornography, in Courbet and Duchamp, in Bataille’s novels, Hans Bellmer’s
dolls, Viennese Actionism, Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy, but also in pornographers
later honored as artists, such as photographers Nobuyoshi Araki and Irving Klaw, fetish
comic strip artist Eric Stanton and sexploitation moviemakers Russ Meyer, Doris Wish-
man, Jean Rollin (whose work was honored by Aida Ruilova during the most recent Ber-
lin Biennial) and Jess Franco.4 What is obscene in these constellations are fetishes that
become objects of exchange between the porno and underground cultures. Cross-fading
between the biker and gay leather S/M cultures, between Satanism and Fascist iconog-
raphy, Kenneth Anger’s experimental film Scorpio Rising of 1964 exemplarily demon-
strates these transactions. A decade later, Genesis P. Orridge and Cosey Fanny Tutti will
copy this back into youth culture with their pornographic performance group COUM
Transmissions, from which the band Throbbing Gristle and industrial music emerge, as
will punk fashion, collaged by Vivienne Westwood at her London boutique SEX, out of
bondage and fetish accessories.
McLaren’s and Westwood’s punk is the bourgeois culture of sentiment inverted, mo-
bilising the registers of the ugly, the disgusting and the obscene for an anti-beautiful
aesthetic. Little wonder, then, that in its later, no less bourgeois mutation into the Au-
tonomist culture of squat houses, construction trailer camps and cultural centres, punk
claimed a different, “alternative” kind of beauty for itself. Following the same logic, the
connotations of the fetish are transformed from the obscene into the anti-obscene in the
sex stage shows of early hard-core punk band Plasmatics, featuring frontwoman Wendy
O. Williams, a former stripper and porn actress, and later of the punk/metal women’s
band Rockbitch, and finally in “Indie porn,” an allegedly punk-cultural Internet phe-
nomenon. During the 1990s, specialised porn websites establish the genre of “Gothic
porn” with otherwise conventional pornographic images and videos showing women in
the Dark Wave look. In 2001, “Suicide Girls,” the first commercially successful Indie
porn website, emerges from this environment.5
But punk, thus dressed up as leftist radicalism, disowned its roots in fetishism, or
rather displayed its other side, traced already in the late 1970s rivalry between punk and
disco by Spike Lee’sfilm Summer of Sam, with punk culture dominated by heterosexual
white men, nursing its resentments of the poly-sexual, gay-dominated and multi-ethnic
disco culture. German polit-punk band Slime’s disparaging refrain of 1981, Samstag
Nacht, Discozeit / Girls Girls Girls zum Ficken bereit (Saturday night, disco time / girls
girls girls ready to fuck),” expressed an attitude which, six years later, at the apex of the
feminist “PorNo” campaign, exploded in violence at the Berlin theatre Eiszeit, when
an autonomous commando raided a presentation of Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch’s
underground porn movie Fingered. Even today, debates over pornography belabor this
conflict, though less explicitly so. Proclamations of an alternative pornographic culture
174 C’Lick Me
and imagination still always also mean taking a stand against anti-pornography femi-
nism. And the other origin of Indie porn, besides commercial Gothic porn sites, is the
“sex-positive feminism” – founded by Susie Bright, Diana Cage, and others as a counter-
movement to the PorNo campaign of Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and, in
Germany, Alice Schwarzer – which not only discussed but also put into creative practice
a “different” pornography incorporating feminist reflections; for instance, in the Lesbian
journal On Our Backs, in the German Konkursbuch publisher’s annual Das heimliche
Auge, and at Nerve.com.
Both feminist tendencies, anti-porn and pro-porn, disagree on the therapy but not on
the diagnosis that mainstream pornography is sexist and disgusting.6 What is often over-
looked, especially in Europe, is that Dworkin and MacKinnon by no means demanded
that pornography be prohibited or censored.7 Instead, their campaign acknowledges the
power of sex and of the obscene imagination; the power that virtually all varieties of alter-
native pornography play down as a game without consequences, rationalise and repress.
Indie porn replaces the rhetoric of artificiality in classical mainstream pornography —
artificial body parts, sterile studios, wooden acting —with a rhetoric of the authentic: in-
stead of mask-like bodies normalised using make-up, wigs and implants, the authentic
person is exposed and protruded not physically, as in Gonzo porn, but psychically. Indie
porn websites, comprehensive links to which can be found at www.indienudes.com, no
longer emulate the cover aesthetics of porn videos and magazines but have switched to a
standard format including diaries, blogs and discussion forums where users communicate
with models and models with each other in a rationalised discourse characterised by a
pretense of mutual respect, while the private person is at the same time in her “authen-
tic” totality exposed to the public view, following exactly the logic traced by Foucault in
the development of the penal system from the physical mutilation of the offender to the
modern panoptic prison’s psychological terror.
With this personalisation and psychologisation, Indie porn is making the logical next
step in a progressive unmasking of the pornographic actor that began in the 1980s with
the switch (recounted at epic length in the movie Boogie Nights) from 35 millimeter
porno-theatre flicks to cheap video, continued in Gonzo anal sex porn, and culminates
in Internet pornography. Gonzo porn is even more subversive and transgressive than In-
die pornography in that it subliminally satisfies and thus installs gay desires within the
heterosexual mainstream: anal barebacking, women styled like drag queens, and — in
contradistinction from most 1970s and 1980s porn — offensively sexualised male stars,
like Rocco Siffredi, in the camera’s focus. What Gonzo stages as a radical poiesis and
white-trash body performance in the vein of “Jackass,” is turned in Indie porn into a sen-
timentalised confessional discourse before a paying audience cast as voyeuristic confes-
sors, with constant assurances of the bourgeois normalcy and, irrespective of its rating,
the playful harmlessness of the sex on view.
Just as Indie pop is a specious alternative to the music industry’s mainstream, and in
reality based on the same business model, which is being protected by ever more absurd
copyright laws, preventive technology, cease-and-desist notices and searches of homes,
Indie porn is not at all “independent” but in fact commercialised and sealed off from free
channels, even positioned in opposition to them: precisely because the mainstream mer-
chandise is easily available on peer-to-peer exchanges, pornography, just like pop music,
now sells only by virtue of difference, including difference from itself.
This text was commissioned by the German art magazine Texte zur Kunst
(www.textezurkunst.de) for its ‘PORNO’ issue (no. 64, December 2006), and is on-
line at www.textezurkunst.de/NR64/SODOM-BLOGGING-d.html (German) and
www.textezurkunst.de/NR64/SODOM-BLOGGING-e.html (English).
English translation by Gerrit Jackson.
Notes
1. “Sex ist das Spiel der Erwachsenen,” interview in Der Tagesspiegel, 7/2/2006.
2. Cf. Mark Terkessidis, “Wie weit kannst du gehen?,” in: Die Tageszeitung,
8/18/2006.
3. Gorsen, P. (1987) Sexualdsthetik, Reinbek, p. 481 ff.
4. Porn and art are fused in Otto Muehl, who on the one hand anticipated the imag-
ery and rhetoric of mainstream and scat fetish porn with his formulaic sexist and
voyeuristic material Actions, on the other hand, took part in the making of the sex-
ploitation movies Schamlos [Shameless]” (1968) and Wunderland der Liebe — Der
groﬂe deutsche Sexreport [Wonderland of Love - The Great German Sex Report]”
(1970); a similar path was taken in 1981 by pop singer and future sex guru Chris-
tian Anders in his movie Die Todesgttin des Liebescamps [The Love Camp’s God-
dess of Death].
5. It is a less well-known fact that Hustler publisher Larry Flynt started a porn maga-
zine called Rage, styled as “Alternative pop” in its photography, typography and
copy, already in 1997; its publication was soon discontinued. Joanna Angel, host of
Indie porn website burningangel.com, now works for Flynt’s Hustler Video.
6. Or they are fused, as in Catherine Breillat’s films, in the synthesis that sexuality’s
being per se sexist can be made a source of infernal pleasures.
7. See Barbara Vinken’s preface in Drucilla Cornell, Die Versuchung der Pornogra-
phie, Frankfurt/M. 1997.
177
Nightmares in Cyberspace
Urban Legends, Moral Panics and the Dark Side of the Net
Mikita Brottman
My friend’s brother Jack has always used Internet porn, but recently he’s been getting
into S/M and other, more extreme fetishes. Recently, he met a woman online through
a local S/M site. He was engaged to be married at the time, and he kept telling us he
was going to stop his porn habit as soon as he was married. Anyway, after weeks of heavy
cybersex with this woman, Jack got the idea of having a final fling before his wedding,
and agreed to meet her a local S/M club. “I’ll be easy to spot,” she e-mailed him. “I’ll be
dressed in black, with a spiked leather dog collar round my neck.” So, on the appointed
night, after a few stiff drinks to get his courage up, Jack made his way to the club, went
up to the bar as they’d planned, surveyed the room, and spotted a sexy older blonde
dressed in black with a spiked dog collar round her neck. Their eyes met, she waved,
Jack waved back, and she came over to meet him … and Jack discovered, much to his
horror, that his cyber-mistress was none other than his own mother. Truth or fiction?
The person who told it to me, about ten years ago, certainly believed it was true. She
didn’t know much about the Internet at the time, didn’t use e-mail, and said she’d heard
the story from somebody who knew Jack’s sister. Whether or not you believe the story, the
fact that it’s being passed along as true means it has a certain degree of plausibility. Even
if you don’t think the story really happened, you’d probably agree that it could have.
As a matter of fact, this story is an urban legend — that is, a piece of contemporary
folklore passed on in the form of anecdote, gossip, rumor or e-mail. The oldest urban
legends have become well known: the story of albino alligators living in the sewers of
New York City, the woman who tried to dry her poodle by putting it in the microwave.
We’ve all heard these kinds of stories; maybe we believed them and passed them on to
other people, and with good reason. While urban legends aren’t “true” – at least, not in
178 C’Lick Me
the literal sense — there are truths contained within them: truths about people’s fears,
desires, anxieties and nightmares. If they didn’t carry a certain amount of symbolic or
metaphorical truth, these stories wouldn’t stick, they wouldn’t be passed along — just as
I’m passing this one along to you now.
This story – let’s call it “Oedipus online” — is just one version of a number of urban
legends told about the Internet, most of which are disguised admonitions warning against
the dangerous seductions of cybersex. Most of these stories deal with people who become
sexually involved online, only to discover that at least one of them is not who they claim
to be. Sometimes, the couple turns out to be closely related: mother and son, father and
daughter, or brother and sister. Sometimes they turn out to be people who know one oth-
er in a very different context in “real life” — they may be teacher and student, priest and
churchgoer, doctor and patient. In other, more cautionary tales, the victim – usually a
young girl seduced into a secret meeting with her online lover — is never seen again, until
her body is discovered months later, at the bottom of a well on a long-abandoned farm.
Urban legends appear plausible because, like most of the things we believe to be true,
they tap into commonly-held cultural assumptions about the way things work. In “Oedi-
pus online,” for example, a number of assumptions are implicit, if not stated directly.
AssumpTion #1:
The anonymity of the Internet
means people may not be who they seem
This may be true, but it’s nothing new. Stories about anonymous correspondences have
been told for centuries, though (in this one), allusions to the Internet and to S/M make
it seem scarily modern, at least to those who believe it. But e-mail and text messages
aren’t the only kinds of writing that can be anonymous. As an item of folklore, and with-
out the Internet or the kinky sex, stories about a secret correspondent who turns out to
be someone you already know are a staple element of popular movies. In the recent
Hollywood film Must Love Dogs, for example, Diane Lane answers an online lonely
hearts ad only to end up on a date with her own dad, and the cheesy eighties song “If
You Like Pina Colada” is about a man who unwittingly answers an ad posted by his
own wife. In a more literary vein, the story appears as the Cyrano de Bergerac theme, in
which wonderful love-letters and declarations of passion turn out to be authored not by
the handsome fool, as first assumed, but by the overlooked underdog. And in its most
sinister form, the theme recurs in those urban legends about menacing phone calls that
are traced to the upstairs extension, or serial killers who are unmasked and revealed to
be your friendly suburban neighbor — or, even worse, your own husband, father or son.
To many people, what’s most frightening about the Internet is its capacity for anonym-
ity, an anxiety confirmed by frequent news stories about “expert advice” offered on the
web by doctors and lawyers who turn out to be eight year old supergeeks, teenage hack-
ers who single-handedly bring down huge corporations. These anxieties feed into the
media’s depiction of the Internet as the new “out there” of American culture, the home
of all those evil people — psychopaths, suicide bombers, Islamic terrorists, and other as-
sorted sickos — who are repsonsible for the horrors that occur on a daily basis in modern
society, or so many seem to believe.
Cyberspace is the new hell where no-one can hear you scream.
Assumption #2:
The Internet can be misused,
with terrifying consequences
There’s something very specific about the concept of the Internet that makes it particu-
larly scary to those unfamiliar with it. All new forms of technology are frightening when
they first appear, and generally bring with them a new rash of rumors and legends about
their possible dangers, and what happens when they go wrong. We’ve all heard earlier
versions of anti-technology stories: the girl who fell asleep under a tanning bed and
burned alive, the rumor that cell phones cause brain cancer, even the microwaved pet.
Urban legends about the Internet are no different. To the media, especially the conser-
vative Christian media, the computer screen is customarily regarded as a kind of magic
portal, one of the seven gates of Hell, perhaps, through which invisible viruses can leak
out to infect your home, turning your husband into a porn fiend and your children into
the victims of drooling pedophiles.
“The social changes which have followed the Internet explosion,” writes computer
expert John Ives in the online journal Bad Subjects, “themselves quite abrupt, have led
to stories which suggest near-apocalyptic scenarios in which innocent users find them-
selves at the mercy of forces beyond their control.” Ives explains how people’s fear of the
Internet’s power to disrupt community stability and organization is typified by anxieties
about computer viruses that are capable of physically eating their way through your hard
drive, or making your computer screen literally explode. To many people, especially
those who don’t understand how their computers work, cyberspace is an unrestricted,
unpoliced no-man’s land where pedophiles swap tips, teenagers make suicide pacts, and
every smiley face conceals a pervert’s evil smirk.
Christian organizations, censorship advocates, moral crusaders and other fans of
“family values” regularly express a profoundly superstitious terror of the power of the
Internet to wreak havoc in our lives, to turn us all into porn fiends, child-abusers and
serial killers. In the conservative media, the Internet is portrayed as the gateway to a
monstrous otherworld, and the corresponding assumption that pixels on a screen can
cause rape and murder is rarely called into question. Many women, and perhaps even
more men, seem especially terrified by the power of pornography to sexually arouse the
viewer, thereby forming a potent threat to all those lies that are perpetuated in the name
of “the family.”
Assumption #3:
Internet porn can “draw you in” unawares
Warnings about the magnetic power of the net, whether their context is that of Chris-
tian morality or the “clinical objectivity” of therapeutics, share certain unquestioned
180 C’Lick Me
assumptions. Above all, it’s taken for granted that, because of its capacity to “draw you
in,” the Internet is far more menacing than traditional forms of media, like film or tele-
vision. It’s often described as having its own powers of agency; it can entrap you in a
subtle, almost magical way, sucking you in unwittingly, without your consent, almost
without your knowledge, until next thing you know, you can’t stop: you’re an “addict.”
According to Patrick Carnes et al., co-authors of the book In the Shadows of the Net:
The Internet and cybersex … are like the Sirens’ call, a seemingly innocent and harm-
lessbeckoning to enter a portal that distorts time, perceptions, and values. Cybersex can
override your inner voice and begin to collapse your boundaries, just as the reefs crushed
the sailor’s ships as they followed the Sirens’ call. Cybersex is capable of casting a spell
under which you no longer think about what you are doing and distractions fall away
as you slip deeper and deeper into the cyber-world (Carnes et al., 2004:99).
Those who warn against the dangers of netporn seem to feel that its enthralling power
comes from the fact that it is, at the same time, both more and less “real” than the se-
ductions of “ordinary” life. It is “less real,” according to Carnes et al., because it draws
you away from time, place, home, duty and family. Later on in the same book, however,
the authors suggest that cybersex is just as real as other kinds of damaging behavior, if
not more so. It may appear as though you’re “not doing anything with anybody,” they
say, but this illusion is simply one more of the ways the Internet deludes us about the
real consequences of our cybersex behavior to ourselves and our loved ones.
Assumption #4:
Internet porn is addictive
To those who believe in its dangers, netporn is worse than the worst kind of street drugs
because it has the unprecedented power to permantently “burn” horrible images “into
the brain cells” so they can never be deleted. Or so says Mary Anne Layden, co-director
of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s
Center for Cognitive Therapy, who, in a US Senate Committee hearing on the effects
of interent porn, called it the “most concerning thing to psychological health that I
know of existing today.” She added, “Pornography addicts have a more difficult time
recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts, since coke users can get the drug
out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever.” Her testimony
was followed by that of family-values campaigner Dr Judith Reisman, who claimed that
pornography “reflexively and mechanically” restructures your brain turning you into a
porno-zombie. Porn, she says, is an “erototoxin,” producing an addictive “drug cocktail”
of testosterone, oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin with a measurable organic effect on
the brain.” “Involuntary cellular change takes place even during sleep,” she claims, “re-
sisting informed consent.” Reisman’s argument confirms what many Christian conser-
vatives, such as E.L. Bynum of Tbaptist.com, have long suspected:
What happens to the images that we see with our human eyes? Psychologists believe
that the sexual images we see can actually be burned into our minds. The hormone epi-
nephrine is released in the brain when a person is emotionally aroused. This causes a
chemical reaction that actually burns the picture permanently into your memory….
Assumption #5:
Internet porn leads to harder stuff
Most perplexing — because furthest from ordinary, observable patterns human behav-
ior — is the claim that an “addiction” to Internet porn leads the “victim” to become
“sicker and sicker,” compelling him to work his way through a veritable smorgasbord
of sexual depravity — hetero, homo, S/M, bondage, golden showers, bestiality, until fi-
nally, the former hard-working, church-going husband achieves his final transformation
into the ultimate manifestation of human evil: the pedophile. According to the article
“Tricks Pornographers Play” at www.contentwatch.net:
Porn and cybersex addicts have acquired a tolerance to perverse and obscene material,
material that would leave most sick to their stomachs… they’ve got to take a “harder
drug” to get the same high. In too many cases, this “harder drug” is the addict acting
out what they’ve seen in porn, with real people — often innocent women, teens and
children….It’s as if he might go crazy without another session. The withdrawal pains
may drive an addict to find porn or sexual arousal any way and anywhere he can.
In fact, some people believe the reach of the Internet knows no knows no bounds: it
has the power to corrupt, destroy, pervert and even, apparently, to kill. According to
Amanda Chapman of Zol.com (a Christian Internet filter provider), “what we expose
ourselves to directly correlates to the acts we commit. In November 1998, an eleven-
year-old boy stabbed an eight-year-old girl to death after viewing graphic, violent porn
on the Internet for twenty minutes.” More recently, in June 2005, a number of websites,
including gamespot.com, referred to a “story out of Korea which is just now surfacing in
the Western press,” concerning a couple who left their four-month old daughter alone
while they went to a “nearby Internet cafe” and “lost themselves” playing an online
game, returning home to find “their infant dead from suffocation.” The article’s head-
line read: “Couple’s online gaming causes infant’s death.” And on 9 March, 2004, a
number of sites and blogs, such as RawFeed, carried an item about a “thirty-one-year old
computer addict” in the Sichuan province of western China who “collapsed and died
at his screen” after “a marathon session” of twenty hours non-stop online. Other than
mentioning “computer addiction,” a cause of death was not given.
The Online Unconscious

Why is the Internet surrounded by so much fear and mystification, especially among
those who use it least? Why is the computer terminal — a chunk of glass and met-
al — considered to be more dangerous, more corrupting, more powerful than traditional
182 C’Lick Me
forms of media, “ordinary” pornography, even illegal drugs? After all, the Internet, in
its physical manifestation, is nothing more than pixels on a screen, a piece of silicon
etched with symbols, no more capable of inflicting damage, one might imagine, than
than a wall carved with hieroglyphics, or a sheet of music. What is it about the Internet
that has caused it to be endowed with these magical powers, these terrifying capacties to
restructure our brains while we sleep, contaminate our homes and even to murder us as
we sit mesmerized, helpless before our noxious screens?
I can’t help being reminded of people’s anxieties about the unconscious, in its pop-
ularized form, where it takes the form of a bottomless pit of incestuous mayhem. As it
turns out, these two metaphorical structures — the Internet and the unconscious — share
important similarities. Unlike other manifestations of popular culture like television or
movies, which are often considered by the psychoanalytically inclined to reveal the un-
conscious of a nation, a culture or a generation, what appears on the individual’s com-
puter screen is summoned up privately, in response to individual promptings. Repressed
sexual urges and desires tend to find their own outlet, according to Freud, such as erotic
dreams and nocturnal emissions.
Significantly, those most fearful of being “seduced” by “torrents of filth” unleashed
by the Internet seem to be those whose sexuality is repressed in the service of a higher
ideal, such as God, marriage, or the Family. It’s interesting that, in general, those who find
netporn most threatening are not young children themselves —who are more curious
than frightened by it —but their parents. Of course, their rationale is that children need
protecting, that they are too innocent to know what they’re dealing with. Interestingly,
however, many anti-Internet evangelists realize that a lot of parents buy computers not
for themselves but for their children —and when the children “accidentally” unleash the
Pandora’s Box of netporn, it’s their parents who find themselves suddenly “drawn in.”
Another thing the Internet shares with the unconscious —at least, according popular
preconceptions —is its tendency to betray its user or owner by slips of the tongue —or, in
the case of the Internet, the fingers. According to those who fear it, the most common way
for the Internet to entrap innocent people is by “misinterpreting” a word or phrase nor-
mally considered inoffensive, and suddenly a “flood of filth” is released on to the screen.
“In the perverted world of cyberporn,” we are informed, innocent phrases have “all kinds
of sexual connotations”; “common words like “dog,’ “boy” and “girl” unleash sexual con-
tent.” Warnings about the “dark side of the Internet” often take the form of anecdotes de-
scribing innocents being led astray by a misplaced word, phrase or typo: the mother who,
wanting to take her children to the “Wet and Wild” Water Park, typed “Wet and Wild”
into a search engine, with shocking results; the little girl whose search for “Barbie” leads
her into a web of vice. According to the authors of In the Shadows of the Net:
A client told of her ten-year-old doing a research project on black holes. She typed in
the term “black hole” and was greeted by a web site dedicated to the genitalia of black
women and a screen full of black women’s vulvas. Another client spoke of how his son
wanted to learn more about the president of our country and the White House. He made
a mistake when typing “www.whitehouse.gov” into the search engine and ended up in a
porn site. Even accidental discovery gives kids access (Carnes et al, 2004:192-193).
It’s as though the Internet, with its filthy and lascivious mind, has the dirty habit of
finding sexual connotations and double entendres in the most innocent of expressions.
In this, it reminds me of the “ghostly voice” of the hypnotist’s dummy, or the parrot
which — in the convention of the dirty joke — “accidentally” reveals the secrets of its
owner, usually implying lascivious desires, or a sordid past. If we consider these “mis-
readings” as examples of what Freud, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, called
“parapraxes” — accidental glimpses of repressed or unconscious desires — maybe we can
start to make sense of “Oedpius online,” and all those other stories about people who
“accidentally” have sex, albeit cybersex, with their mothers, daughters and sons. After
all, incest is still a sexual taboo, something we all find repellent, because (if Freud is
right) it is something we all secretly desire.
This, I think, is what makes the Internet so threatening to many people, since, as ev-
eryone knows (because pop Freudianism permeates our culture’s understanding of how
the mind works), these accidental glimpses into the “dark side of the net” aren’t random
or innocent, they reveal something. Even people who’ve never heard of Freud have gen-
erally still internalized the notion of the unconscious, believing we’re composed of an
“inner” and an “outer” life; the outer life being our daily behavior, the process of social-
ization or religious salvation that holds all manner of pleasure-seeking urges and dark
desires at bay. What’s frightening about this to many people is that, as in every surface-
depth paradigm, the hidden thing — the “dark side” — is presumed to have more truth,
more value, than what is on the surface, obvious to all.
Anxiety about the Internet is perhaps best seen as a form of moral panic — that is, a
type of collective behavior characterized by sociologist Jeffrey Victor in his well-known
article on ritual child abuse as involving “suddenly increased concern and hostility, in a
significant segment of society, in reaction to widespread beliefs about a newly perceived
threat from moral deviants” (Victor, 1998:100). According to Victor, a moral panic gen-
erally gives rise to social movements aimed at eliminating the threatening deviants, and
may generate moral crusades and political struggles over the use of the law to suppress
them. This is exactly what has happened in the US, where conservative pressure groups
are trying to legislate censorship regulations for the Internet, and punishment for those
who defy the rules.
Moral panics like this one are result of self-deception, what philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre in Being and Nothingness referred to as “bad faith.” In his book The Divided
Self, radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing described how social structures can elicit popular
delusions by putting people in impossible situations, where they find themselves utterly
unable to conform to the conflicting expectations of their society, such as the contradic-
tion between ordinary sexual urges and the imperatives of monogamy. Such paradoxes
lead inevitably to a “lose-lose situation” and immense mental distress, unless we have
some kind of system for keeping them in balance. To Laing, the family is one of these
184 C’Lick Me
systems; he describes it as a “mutual protection racket” (Laing, 1965:34). Our belief in

the natural sanctity of the family, claims Laing, creates a kind of mass delusion whose
function is “to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life;
to cut off transcendence…to promote respect, conformity, obedience…[and] respect for
“respectability””(Laing, 1965:35).
We may not be aware of it, but a lot of the things we believe are actually urban leg-
ends. We all repeat things we’ve heard from other people, things we’ve read in a book or
a magazine, things we’ve seen on television. We believe these things to be true because
they tap into our cultural assumptions about the way things work. These stories take many
different forms. Some are classic urban legends whose form is so plausible and so new
that they still have to be recognised as such. Others are more akin to clichés or stereotypes
than fully-formed narratives. All, however, are so often taken for granted that they simply
“go without saying,” they are “common sense .” They are illusions that have acquired the
status of truth because they fit the pattern of the way things work —or the way we believe
things work. Or perhaps, more to the point, they fit a pattern that seems natural —and we
all like to think life has a pattern to it, even if this pattern is an illusion, as Gustave Le Bon
succinctly explained in his 1895 book The Crowd, a study of the popular mind:
From the dawn of civilization onwards, crowds have always undergone the influence of
illusions… The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence
that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can
supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy illusions
is always their victim.
References
Bynum, E.L. (1998) “Internet Filth for your Children,” Tabernacle Baptist Challenger
(August) Lubbock, Texas (http://www.tbaptist.com/aab/pbc-8-98.htm).
Le Bon, G. (1895 [2002]) The Crowd, NY, Dover, p. 12.
Carnes, P., D.L. Delmonico, E. Griffin and J Moriarty (2004) In the Shadows of the
Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behavior, Hazelden Books.
Chapman, A. “Are Pedophiles in Your Home?”Christian Topical Library, Zion Online:

http://www.zol.com/dial-up-features-library-pedophiles.html.
ContentWatch, “Tricks Pornographers Play,” Article Archive, ContentWatch, http://

www.contentwatch.com/learn_center/article.php?id=108.
“Couple’s Online Gaming Causes Infant’s Death,” (2005), Gamespot.com June 20,
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/20/news_6127866.html.
“Escape” (“The Pina Colada Song”) (1979), Rupert Homes, Partners in Crime.
“First Ever Death From Overdose of Computer Gaming,” The Raw Feed Archives,
Mike’sList, 7 March 2004, http://www.mikeslist.com/2004_03_07_archive.html.
Freud, S. (1960) Standard Edition, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Vol. VI, trans.
James Strachey, London, Hogarth Press, XII-XIII (footnote #1).
Ives, J. (1998) “Computer Virus Hoaxes: Urban Legends for the Digital Age,” Bad Sub-
jects, Issue 37, March, http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1998/37/ives.html.
Laing, R.D. (1965) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, Lon-
don, Penguin.
Layden, M.A. (2004) “The Science Behind Pornography Addiction,” Hearing of the
US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, November 18, http://
commerce.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=1343&wit_id=3912.
Must Love Dogs (2005), dir: Gary David Goldberg, Warner Brothers.
Reisman, J. (2004) Testimony before US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science

& Transportation, November 18, http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.
cfm?id=1343&wit_id=3910.
Sartre, J.P. (1943[1993]) Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, NY, Washing-
ton Square Press, pp. 93-106.
Victor, J.S. (1998) “Moral panics and the social construction of deviant behavior: a the-
ory and application to the case of ritual child abuse,” in Sociological Perspectives, Fall,
pp. 99-125.
187
BBW:
Techno-archaism,
Excessive Corporeality
and Network Sexuality
Michael Goddard
“I am only truly able to love a woman […] who overpowers me with her beauty, her
temperament, her intelligence, her willpower, a woman who rules over me.”
“Then you are attracted by what others find repulsive?”
“That is right.” (Sacher-Masoch, “Venus in Furs,” Masochism)
The acronym BBW, or Big Beautiful Women (although on many porn sites its seman-
tics slides towards big breasted women), refers to an anomalous zone of desire and eroti-
cism that has come to proliferate extensively, especially on the Internet, and which poses
important questions about the relations between bodies, gender, desire and machines.
Teleologies of cyberculture tend to propose narratives of the progressive virtualisation
and disembodiment of human agents. This tendency is echoed in the fashion industry
and women’s magazines and even arguably in much mainstream porn and erotica, in
which female bodies become mere supports for incorporeal signs or shrink into vestigial
anorexic artefacts.
In this context, the phenomenon of BBW radically fails to conform to this logic. In
the paradoxical world of BBW, women who by normative standards of contemporary
beauty would be considered everything from mildly overweight to monstrously obese,
are presented or present themselves as privileged objects and frequently as subjects of
desire, or in BBW terms, as Goddesses, rather than as marginalised bodies falling short
of the frequently analysed anorexic beauty myth.1 This paper will investigate the BBW
phenomenon as a counter-mythology or counter-imaginary to these prevailing myths,
analysing it as a complex phenomenon that crosses many representational forms from
soft and hardcore porn, to Internet dating sites, to sites organising social networks and
188 C’Lick Me
events, sites affirming BBW subjectivities, promoting BBW fashion, or BBW artwork
and photography.2 The term BBW also crosses other boundaries between the amateur
and the professional or commercial, between ethnicities and nationalities, as well as be-
tween different media including video/DVD, magazines and phone lines. Nonetheless,
I will be arguing the BBW is primarily an Internet phenomenon and that it is the dis-
tinct properties of the net itself that have enabled its emergence and continue to provide
an ideal space for the valorisation of an excessive corporeality that would normatively
be seen as monstrous. For this reason, the BBW phenomenon also provides key insights
into the non-normative potentials of cyberculture itself that contradict the teleologies of
progressive disembodiment referred to above. This essay will neither present an exhaus-
tive typology of BBW sites, nor does it aim to come up with a unified theory to explain
this phenomenon and its proliferation in contemporary culture; rather, it will present a
variety of examples of different types of BBW Website and then make some preliminary
speculations as to how this phenomenon might be both theorised and made productive
in the field of porn criticism.
Some Examples of BBW Internet Sites

The following typology of websites represents only an initial and contingent exploration
but aims to give some indication of the variety of BBW sites on the Internet.
Personal / ‘Amateur’ Websites.

Put BBW into a search engine and you will be directed to hundreds of these sites. Typi-
cally they will be run either by a single BBW, a BBW fan, or on behalf of a limited
group of BBWs. Typically they include photo galleries, webcams and Video/DVD; a
limited amount of which is available for free, but largely as an advertisement to the
much more extensive material for which you need to either subscribe to the site or pay
per view. These images can range from anything from mild, partially clothed eroticism
to hardcore pornography. There is also frequently textual material not only advertising
the site, but often presenting the personality or personalities of the BBWs themselves,
and in some cases promoting BBW issues from size acceptance to plus-size fashion. Of
course these sites are subject to thousands of variations; two typical examples of these
different types of site would be MelonieRose.com, the site of a group of BBW organised
by Melonie Rose, an African-American ‘Super Sized’ BBW and LovingYouLarge.com,
a site organised by a BBW ‘fan’ and supporter; this latter site complements its mildly
pornographic material with a lot of pro-BBW textual material. In both these cases while
BBWs are clearly presented as erotic objects for a solicited male gaze, they are also af-
firmed as desiring subjects, a point to which this essay will return.3 While initially some
of these sites were completely amateur in their production and free in their reception,
the majority of them have tended to undergo a professionalisation so that it is rare to
find a free access BBW porn site, although some free softcore sites exist in the form of
on-line groups, and most of these sites are linked up with larger commercial networks
and netporn search engines.
Commercial/Corporate Sites
These can be understood as the apparatuses of capture for the more spontaneous and
amateur BBW sites, and they are characterised by a strict market logic. While there are
many examples ranging from small entrepreneurs to massive transnational conglomer-
ates, we can take as exemplary the transmedia network Score Group, which hosts both
Voluptuous.com and XLGirls.com, in addition to its extensive range of non BBW porn
interests; both these sites have magazine and Video/DVD counterparts with every pos-
sibility of transmarketing between these different media fully exploited. On these sites
a definite mainstreaming or policing of the BBW phenomena is apparent; especially
on Voluptuous a relative conformity with conventional standards of beauty results in a
preponderance of young, frequently blonde models, whose bodies sometimes only devi-
ate from the pornographic mainstream in terms of larger than usual natural breast size.4
There is also the deliberate cultivation of the star personas of the models, through regu-
lar beauty competitions in which subscribers can vote, through satellite sites of the more
popular models and through the presentation of profiles of all the models. However,
even in this blatantly commercial arena, one still finds the valorisation of larger women,
even an interest in their subjectivities expressed through interviews and other textual
material. Of course much of this supposedly documentary material is fake but the main
point is that it rhetorically presents an supposed interest in and affirmation of BBW
subjectivities, implicitly shared by BBW consumers. The main function of these sites,
however, is to permit access to an enormous image bank of voluptuous ‘stars,’ many of
whose images are not available elsewhere, thereby ensuring the popularity and profit-
ability of the sites as does the intensive cross-media marketing of video and magazines,
star websites etc.
Dating Sites and Social Networks

There is a whole other variety of BBW sites, however, that while not strictly or necessari-
ly pornographic, are nevertheless essential to the circulation of this term. These include
dating sites whether solely dedicated to BBW such as bbwhearts.com, or with BBW
potentials inscribed in their search engines, as in AdultFriendFinder.com or Alt.com.
There are also poly-function sites such as Rondeetjolie.com in France, which started as
the site for a larger women fashion store in Paris and has expanded to include articles,
dating (with photos), organising social events, displaying BBW artwork etc. Other sites
such as Allegrofortissimo.com are simple discussion and support boards ranging form
support Internetworks to dating, and still others focus on social issues, organise on and
off-line communities and perform many other functions, with or without the presence
of BBW images. These sites are either free or operate with a minimal subscription, while
the dating only sites tend to be free to browse but require subscriptions to use them.
While these sites range from the mildly pornographic to those with no erotic images at
all, all of them advocate a valorisation and eroticisation of BBW bodies and subjectivi-
ties, at times accompanied by images only different in degree from their pornographic
counterparts. The dissemination of BBW therefore clearly crosses not only media and
190 C’Lick Me
genre boundaries but also between what is and is not considered pornographic, allow-
ing for a potential contamination between the pornographic and the everyday.
Blogs
Finally there is the more recent phenomenon of weblogs that operate as a kind of fil-
tering system by means of which erotic images and webpages that would normally only
be available through a commercial transaction are rendered freely available. While the
degree zero of BBW blogs are nothing more than a form of advertising for commercial
sites, many of which now use blogs as a key method for attracting consumers. In other
instances, such as the blog WeLoveBigGirls.blogspot.com,, there is a highly affirmative
presentation of BBWs, ranging from amateur shared photos to materials taken from
commercial sites. These sites are also marked by a promotion of interactivity, encourag-
ing consumers to share photos and comments on the materials presented on the site and
tend to be characterised by a good-natured humour at the expense of porn conventions
rather than at BBWs themselves, whose subjectivities are rather affirmed.
Given this rough outline of the phenomenon of BBW on the Internet, how then
is it possible to interpret it? Is it just another example of the reification or pornographi-
cisation of contemporary capitalist culture or does it contain subversive potentials rel-
evant to other spheres of contemporary cultural practice and politicised subjectivities?
To begin with we can identify several counter-normative discursive tropes that intersect
in the field of BBW phenomena:
1. An archaic valorisation of powerful female bodies that evokes pre-monotheis-

tic matriarchal religions or at least earlier historical eras prior to the imposition of the
contemporary anorexic beauty myth. These range historically from the Baroque and
Pre-Raphaelite depictions of curved female forms, to the more voluptuous cinematic
iconography of the 1950s. There is also archaism in the psychological sense, in that the
image of the powerful, voluptuous woman with large breasts evokes memories of the
infantile perception of the pre-Oedipal oral mother, who is perceived in a state of adora-
tion largely focused on the mouth and especially breasts. This is evoked both physically
in terms of scale and in terms of the power invested in the BBW image. Synthetically, it
can be stated that this is the Goddess dimension of the BBW phenomenon.
2. A post or pseudo feminist discourse of empowerment through erotic self-valorisa-

tion. From the most radical to the most mainstream sites, the concept of self-empower-
ment through recognizing oneself as a BBW, posing for the first time and becoming a
BBW model is a constant with frequent statements of the type: “before I just felt over-
weight and unattractive but now I feel like a Goddess.” While the size acceptance poli-
tics of empowerment is often a very moderate form of cultural critique, it can take on
more explicitly political dimensions, such as in the site moderated by Velvet Vixen, a
self-declared fat activist, whose Yahoo group contains, in addition to photos of herself
and other BBW models, activist critiques of a variety of BBW-related issues and prac-
tices, such as the notorious anti-BBW practice of pig hunting. In other contexts this val-
orisation takes on a more therapeutic, new age dimension, for example in the sense of
how to feel great without dieting, but even so the valorisation of otherwise marginalised
female bodies is implicitly political and contains potentials for further politicisation.
3. Discourses related to the field of sadomasochism or bondage and discipline. It is

important to note, however, that this can take contradictory forms. In the most seem-
ingly transgressive, hardcore and sadistic forms, in which BBWs are frequently humili-
ated, tamed and dominated, there seems to be a counter-reaction against not only the
valorisation but also the pleasure that is the key to the BBW phenomenon. The idea
is that even big women can be mastered and humiliated by the phallus through such
pornographic practices as extreme breast bondage, multiple ejaculation on breasts and
faces and gang bangs. This is not far removed from the reactionary sexual practices of
‘pig hunting’ alluded to above in which out of a group of women the biggest will be se-
lected for a degrading sexual encounter or the equally notorious phenomena of feeders
in which pleasure is produced through the deliberate over-feeding of an already ‘obese’
BBW. In both cases the normative prejudice against large women is sadistically rein-
forced and the non-normative pleasures opened up by the BBW phenomena violently
repressed and denied. This rejection removes these practices from the field of BBW al-
together since the term is meaningless without its erotic valorisation and reverts into a
reinforcement of corporeal normativity.
4. On the other hand, the valorisation of a powerful female figure clearly corresponds
to a masochistic economy, whether or not there is any conventional masochistic con-
tent. The obvious interstice here is in the figure of the dominant voluptuous mistress,
which can be found in both BBW and bondage and domination contexts both on and
off-line. However, even in the case of relatively mainstream BBW figures, there are still
aspects of a masochistic economy such as the idealization of the female as opposed to
the relative insignificance of the male figure, as evident in the relatively high frequency
of scenes of female auto-eroticism and pseudo-lesbian scenes in BBW porn, the attribu-
tion of greater power to female figures rather than male ones, not only by taking a domi-
nant role but by coupling with more than one male partner, implying that one is not
enough to satisfy her, and especially in the association of BBW with orality — literally in
the sense that BBW scenes tend to focus on oral sex and breast play rather than conven-
tional genitality, the practice of breast sex rather than vaginal penetration being the es-
sential component of most BBW scenes.5
The proximity between BBW phenomena and masochistic economies of desire can
be productively elucidated by a re-examination of Deleuze’s essay on Masochism, “Cold-
ness and Cruelty.” This work is a reading of the work of Sacher-Masoch and of Masoch-
ism more generally in a conceptual framework that radically distinguishes a masochistic
economy from any sadomasochistic entity, as Kraft-Ebbing and later Freud would have
it. In addition to the above mentioned correspondences between BBW and maoschistic
192 C’Lick Me
economies, there are many other parallels. First of all there is the proximity of the female
figure in both BBW and masochism to mythology. Deleuze empahsises the matriarchal
Goddess dimension of masochism in both its mythological and psychological aspects, for
example, in the ideal of the oral mother.6 Then there is the alliance between an adoring
self-effacing male and female narcissism and auto-eroticism (Deleuze , 1989:57-68), the
co-presence of emotional sentimentality and a female power of life and death and the ide-
al of the hermaphroditic body, combining exaggerated female and male characteristics
while maintaining their difference as opposed to the sadistic valorisation of the androgyne
in whom gender differences have been erased. BBW corporeality also corresponds to this
hermaphroditism in that there is not only a heightening of feminine characterstics such as
breasts and voluptuous curves but also an association of the female body with phallic pow-
er. This leads to the next parallelism between BBW and masochistic economies, namely
the suspension of the patriarchal symbolic order in favour of a female-centred cosmos
in which “the father is nothing” (57-68). I would also argue that in line with Deleuze’s
association of humour with masochism whereas sadistic scenarios are associated with a
cynical irony, BBW scenes also tend to be characterised by being relatively humorous in
relation to other forms of porn, one could take as an emblematic example a pornographic
scene in which a BBW begins by giving a man a foot massage...with her breasts. An act
that since visible only to the viewer and not the male protagonist, interferes humorously
with any processes of erotic identification or pornographic realism. In fact this is a final
parallel between BBW and masochistic economies; both enact a suspension of the reality
principle, or in Deleuze’s terms of the law, and maximise the pleasure principle through
the proliferation of utopian fantasies. In the world of BBW this suspension is enacted
not by means of scenes of punishment but through abject surrender to the technical pro-
liferation of virtual BBW images which is masochistic in the strictly economic sense of
a suspension of virile action in favour of a purely erotic perception and passive affective
receptivity, resonating with Masoch’s concept of “supersensualism” (32).
The key difference between the world of BBW and that of masochism would seem to
be the lack of the necessity, although it is certainly one of many possibilities, for cruelty
in the female figure in BBW as opposed to the cold and cruel female dominatrix. How-
ever, the concept of coldness is also, arguably, a key component of BBW phenomena on
the Internet. This might seem counter-intuitive — since many BBW sites overflow with
personal expression and sexual desire tends to be expressed in terms of love and adoration
rather than the erotic consumption of an objectified commodity. However, this apparent
warmth is really just the sentimental flipside that complements rather than contradicts
a certain coldness. Instead, the phenomenon of BBW, as the alliance between female
self-valorisation and eroticisation and male (or female) masochistic self-abandonment
and adoration is based on an essential coldness in which both sides encounter the other
through the medium of the BBW image which, even if moving is a freezing of real and
singular bodies and desires. Moreover, there is also a becoming generic whereby singu-
lar bodies are apprehended in relation to size and weight measurements, as well as all
kinds of typologies by means of which the singular, that is this particular body or desire,
becomes the generic, this type of BBW, this type of BBW desire or scenario. Arguably,
this mania for measurement is merely the attempt to quantify a desire for the immeasur-
able—the pleasure in apprehending an image of a body that seems to overflow all forms
of measurement in an erotic too muchness—nevertheless there is a cold complicity in
both the self-eroticisation of the BBW as image and the consumption of BBW images,
precisely in the mutual consent to a cold contact mediated through images, rather than
a direct contact through bodies. Of course the myth of this direct contact predominates
in BBW porn as in other pornographic and dating sites in the idea that porn is a mere
temporary substitute for a real sexual encounter or that BBW Internet dating is merely
a temporary phase before a real meeting. Yet it is precisely the coldness, abstraction and
virtuality of cyberspace, as opposed to the warm messiness of everyday life that makes
possible the proliferation of BBW desires, imaginations and corporeal figures. As with
the masochistic scenario and many porn scenarios, the BBW world is a utopian one, a
kind of curved and folded non-space of encounter, in which the reality principle, the pa-
triarchal symbolic order and Euclidean geometry are all suspended. And this suspension
could never happen without the distance and abstraction provided by the virtual, smooth
space of the Internet itself in which BBW images can proliferate infinitely along with
the dreams and desires they provoke both in BBWs themselves and their admirers. Of
course, especially in the field of BBW communities and dating sites, this virtual contact
may indeed lead to a physical meeting in the flesh, but this meeting will take place in a
different semiotic regime where the utopian virtual space of the BBW world will have to
contend with all kinds of intrusions from the very realities and particularities that BBW
porn acts to suspend through the creation of a generic utopia.This analysis of BBW leads
to both further questions and some provisional conclusions regarding this phenomenon.
First of all, why is it that this phenomenon of BBW has emerged at this precise historical
moment and particularly through the Internet? As this analysis has shown, the answer to
this lies in a techno-archaism in which, like the phenomenon of modern primitivism,
archaic figures and desires are able to re-appear, provided they are mediated through con-
temporary technical forms, in the BBW world through the online proliferation of digital
images; in other words the warmth of BBW desires is able to circulate precisely through
the cooling effected by the technical image and its smooth online circulation.
The second question is as to what the radical or subversive potentials are in this phe-
nomenon? I have tried to show that BBW is not merely a variant of normative sexuality
but a range of practices that potentially submit the foundation of heterosexual normativ-
ity to a profound questioning from within. This could be the departure point for an explo-
ration what would take this questioning further. One possible and existing strategy is the
setting up of a BBW sexual identity, along the lines of gay, lesbian and trans sexual iden-
tities. However this identitarian approach has little merit as a political strategy, especially
if there is any assumed parallelism between BBW and ‘Big handsome men’ who would
then form a definable community.7 Such an approach reduces BBW to a phenomenon
of symmetry of molar belonging, to a specific place in the social order, whereas what is
interesting about is precisely its capacity to destabilise the norms of heteronormativity
194 C’Lick Me
through a movement to the outside from within the dominant heterosexual order.
Another possible strategy is a kind of BBW activism in the conventional sense, in
which BBW’s and their admirers would intervene in a number of BBW related social and
political issues. This can be clearly seen in the ‘fat activism’ of Velvet Vixen referred to
above, for example, as well as the development of BBW sites that promote respectful and
affirming BBW images and communities, somewhat along the lines of the idealist distinc-
tion between erotica and porn. However essential this form of activism is, it remains on
the molar level of already constituted identities and fails to tap in to the molecular level
of desires and images by means of which the BBW phenomenon circulates
A more interesting strategy is in a kind of immanent Internet parody, in which the
conventions of netporn culture itself are reprocessed and submitted to a humorous and
playful critique. This has already been shown to be the case with the ‘We Love Big Girls’
blog which, while serving the function of operating as a gift economy, providing free
access to otherwise commercial or private pornographic and erotic images, also acts
as a humorous critique of the seriousness of porn conventions, such as generic poses
and scenes. This humorous critique is taken even further in the sites of a Sydney BBW
BustingOut.blogspot.com, aka Wizzie van Doren, especially on her site Kittypong.com
which reworks netporn culture from the humorous and sarcastic perspective of what
could be called a BBW sensibility rather than identity, as her ‘Busting Out’ site does with
Internet pop culture more generally. It is via such blog practices, rather than commercial
BBW sites that the most interesting aspects of BBW culture, namely its subversion of the
heteronormative anorexic beauty myth in favour of an affirmation of a counter-mythol-
ogy of BBW desires, pleasures and subjectivities, find their most lively and potentially
radical expression.
notes
1 While there is no exact definition of a BBW, the term is applied to women weigh-
ing anything from 80 kilograms upwards; there is, of course, no maximum.
2 Of course many sites combine several of these genres as we shall see.
3 In other words these sites both conform to and depart from the economy of the
male gaze as described by Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narra-
tive Cinema.” In fact it would be more accurate to associate the viewing economy
of BBW porn with that of masochistic cinematic fascination as analysed by Steven
Shaviro in The Cinematic Body. This essay will return to this point. See Laura
Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Media and Cultural Studies:
Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, (Oxford: Black-
well, 2001), pp. 393-404 and Steven Shaviro, The Cunematic Body, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), pp. 56-65.
4 Even on these sites there is an absolute rejection of silicone enhanced breasts,
which are reserved for the Scoreland site, although even this site has recently been
infected by the popularity of the more voluptuous, non-surgically modified mod-
els. More extreme BBW sites such as Silicone Free, make this rejection of plastic
surgery absolutely central, thereby fetishising a highly problematic concept of the

natural.
5 This is in contrast to the sadistic representations in mainstream and BBW porn of
gang bangs that are intended to communicate a clear message of the humiliation of
the female protagonist through multiple facial ejaculations, for example. In other
examples of BBW porn, however, the intended meaning is clearly that it takes
more than one man to satisfy a ‘goddess,’ which links both to the trope of masoch-
ism and that of archaism.
6 See Gilles Deleuze, “The Three Women in Masoch,” Masochism, (New York,
Zone Books, 1989), pp. 47-56.
7 This is not to say that there are no parallel phenomena in the sphere of masculini-
ties, for example, in ‘bear’ figures in the gay community, but these figures tap into a
completely different mythology that would require an absolutely different sympta-
matology.
REFERENCES
Deleuze, G. (1989) “Coldness and Cruelty”, Masochism, Trans. McNeil, J., New York,
Zone Books, pp. 9-138.
Mulvey, L. (2001) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Media and Cultural
Studies: Keyworks, eds. M.G. Durham and D. M. Kellner, London: Blackwell.
Sacher-Masoch, L von. (1989) “Venus in Furs”, Masochism, New York, Zone Books, pp.
140-293.
Shaviro, S. (1993) The Cinematic Body. Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press.
WEBSITES
Adultfriendfinder. www.adultfriendfinder.com
Allegro Fortissimo. www.allegrofortissimo.com
Alt. www.alt.com
BBW Hearts. www.bbwhearts.com
Busting Out. www.bustingout.blogspot.com
Kitty Pong. www.kittypong.com
Loving You Large. www.lovingyoularge.com
Melonie Rose. www.melonierose.com
Ronde et Joli. www.rondetjolie.com
Scoreland. www.scoreland.com
Velvet Vixen Group. groups.yahoo.com/group/Velvet_Vixen/
Voluptuous. www.voluptuous.com
We Love Big Girls. welovebiggirls.blogspot.com
XLGirls. www.xlgirls.com
197
The obsession of
the (vanishing) body
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
An old American officer-in-charge of training marines told ‘Newsweek’ something in-

teresting about his own experience: “I used to do this job in the 1970s, during the war
in Vietnam. In those years, it took six months to train a young person to be prepared
to kill a human being. Now I am doing the same job in Iraq, but things have changed.
The young men come here already trained. They come here ready to kill.
Desire dwells in conjunction and is killed by connection. Connection means a rela-

tionship between formatted segments, a compatibilisation of de-singularised bodies.
Conjunction means singular, unrepeatable communication between round bodies;
connection means integration of smooth bodies in a space which is no space, and in a
time which is no time.
The process of change in our time is centred on the shift from conjunction to con-
nection as the paradigm of exchange between conscious organisms. The leading factor of
this change is the insertion of the electronic in the organic, the proliferation of artificial
devices in the organic universe, the body, communication and society. Yet, the effect of
this change is a transformation of the relationship between consciousness and sensibility,
and the increasing desensitisation in the exchange of signs.
Conjunction is the meeting and fusion of round and irregular shapes that are con-
tinuously weaselling their way around with no precision, repetition or perfection. Con-
nection is the punctual and repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions, straight lines
198 C’Lick Me
and points that overlap perfectly, and plug in or out according to discrete modes of inter-
action that render the different parts compatible to a pre-established standard. The shift
from conjunction to connection as the predominant mode of interaction of conscious
organisms is a consequence of the gradual digitalisation of signs and the increasing me-
diatisation of relations.
The digitalisation of communicative processes induces a sort of desensitisation to the
curve, the continuous process of slow becoming and a sort of sensitisation to the code,
and sudden changes of state and series of discrete signs.
Conjunction entails a semantic criterion of interpretation. When the other enters
in conjunction with you, he is sending signs that you must interpret the meaning of by
tracing — if necessary — the intention, the context, the shade, the unsaid. On the con-
trary, connection requires a criterion of interpretation that is purely syntactic. The in-
terpreter must recognise a sequence and be able to carry out the operation foreseen by
the ‘general syntax’ (or operating system); there can be no margins for ambiguity in the
exchange of messages, nor can the intention be manifest through nuances. The gradual
translation of semantic differences into syntactic differences is the process that led from
modern scientific rationalism to cybernetics and eventually made the creation of a digital
web possible.
Conjunction is a process of “becoming other.” In contrast, each connected element
remains distinct and interacts only functionally. Singularities change when they con-
join, they become something other than what they were before their conjunction. The
combination of a-signifying signs gives rise to the emergence of meaning which prev-
iously did not exist.
Rather than a fusion of segments, connection entails a simple effect of machine func-
tionality. The functionality of the connecting materials is implicit in the connection as
a functional modelling that prepares them for interfacing and inter-operability. In order
for connection to be possible, segments must be linguistically compatible. Connection
requires a prior process whereby the elements that need to connect are made compat-
ible. Indeed the digital web extends through the progressive reduction of an increasing
number of elements to a format, a standard and a code that makes compatible different
elements.
Connected bodies are subjected to a kind of progressive inability to feel pleasure. In-
stead, they are forced to choose ways of simulating pleasure; procuring a shift from touch
to vision, from hairy bodies to smooth connectable bodies. The control on the body does
not come from outside. The control is built inside: in the very relationship between self
perception and identity.
When the info-sphere becomes hyper-speedy, hyper-thick, and the impulses are pro-
liferating beyond any limit, we become less and less able to elaborate in a conscious way
on the emotional impulses reaching our skin, our sensitivity, our brain. Consciousness is
detached from sensitivity, and subjugated by the connective machine.
Autistic behaviour can be described as the inability to feel the other’s emotionality,
or to project in the other’s body the pleasure and pain that we feel in our body. Lack of
empathy seems to be an epidemic effect of the increasing exposition of the mind to the
accelerated virtual infosphere.
The acceleration and intensification of nervous stimulants on the conscious organ-
ism seem to have thinned the cognitive film that we might call sensibility. The conscious
organism needs to accelerate its cognitive, gestural, kinetic reactivity. The time available
for responding to nervous stimuli has been dramatically reduced. This is perhaps why
there is an apparent reduction of the capacity for empathy. Symbolic exchange among
human beings is elaborated without empathy because it becomes increasingly difficult to
perceive the existence of the body of the other in time. In order to experience the other
as a sensorial body, you need time, time to caress and smell. The time for empathy is
lacking, because stimulation has become too intense.
Pornography grabs the attention quickly, you don’t need to work for it, you don’t need
to feel empathy, you just watch; almost like an autistic state of mind. It’s not necessary to
try and understand the feelings of the other person, it’s not about them, they are merely
objects or tools in need of satisfaction. Pornographic bodies are deprived of everything
that makes them human by the lurker.
What is at play in the pleasurable perception of one’s own body and the surrounding
environment is an essential question of rhythm, time and lived temporalities. Muscle ten-
sion relaxes in the fullness of pleasure. But by introducing an inorganic element, such
as electronics into the circle of excitement, we impose an acceleration of stimuli and a
contraction of psychophysical reaction times, which causes a change in the organism and
its forms of erotic reaction. Orgasm is replaced by a series of excitations without release.
Orgasm is no longer the prelude to any accomplishment. Inconclusive excitation takes
the place of orgasmic release. Time, an indispensable dimension of pleasure, is cut into
fragments that can no longer be enjoyed. Excitation without release replaces pleasure.
In this condition of autistic excitation without fulfilment, social behaviour tends to
become something similar to obsessive rituals.
In 1907, Freud wrote an essay on the symptomatology of obsession and religious ritu-
als. The ritual, he says, has something to do with the obsession, because it has the same
character of irrealisation and compulsive repetition. Irrealisation and compulsive repeti-
tion are peculiar to both religious behaviour and pornographic sex.
Like pornographic sexuality, religious behaviour performs a ritual which, in its na-
ture, has the stigma of an obsessive neurosis: the repetition of acts which are devoid of
semantic meaning and devoid of special efficiency.
Obsession: compulsive repetition of a ritual which does not fulfil its aim. The real
scope of the ritual is the conjuration which holds the (rite maker’s) own world together.
Porn in general has something to do with the ritual.
It seems that in the experience of the first connective generation the bodily relation-
ship is becoming increasingly difficult, even embarrassing. So the ritual takes the place
of pleasure, and porn becomes a repetitive act of seeing which does not fulfill an emo-
tional end.
I’m not reclaiming any authenticity of the erotic self, I’m not fantasising about the
200 C’Lick Me
golden age of sexual happiness. I’m just interested in finding the signs of a pathology
in the current proliferation of pornography: namely a pathology of emotionality. This
pathology, which is latent in every kind of pornographic product, is highlighted by the
mediatisation, and especially by the net-proliferation of porn. Since image and emotion
are separated, the pornographic act (of vision) does not produce the emotional effect we
are expecting. So we repeat the act (of vision).
The Internet is the place of endless replication, Therefore it is the ideal place of
pornographic ritual.
Stimulus hypertrophy is the general frame which generates the current obsession in
the saturated Info-sphere.
During their long evolution, human beings have slowly developed ways of elaborat-
ing the stimulus of sexual excitation: the entire history of culture can be viewed as a way
to elaboration of the sexual desire. Through imagination and language, human beings
manage to balance the stimulus coming from the environment, and the psychic and
sexual response to it.
We’re now living in the age of the info-proliferation. The saturation of the info-
sphere provokes a stimulus overload, and this has an obvious cognitive effect; our time
for attention decreases. But affective attention takes time, and cannot be abbreviated or
accelerated. This leads to a disorder in the emotional elaboration of meaning. The af-
fective attention suffers a kind of contraction, and it is forced to find ways of adaptation:
the organism adopts tools for simplification, and it tends to smooth out the living psychic
response, and repackages the affective behaviour in a frozen and fixed framework.
The main point is is that emotional elaboration is afflicted by a reduction of time:
pornography is by and large one of the causes of this saturation, and one of the effects, or
better, one of the symptoms of it.
Pornography concurs to the saturation of the info-sphere, and it is simultaneously an
escape from the disturbed psycho-sphere.
What is the meaning of the word “emotion”? Emotion is the meeting point between
body and cognition: it is bodily elaboration of the information that is reaching our mind.
Time of emotionality can be fast (very fast) and can be slow. But sexual emotion needs
slow time for elaboration. The time of caresses cannot be shortened by automatic en-
gines, although pharmacology can fasten the sexual reactions, and speed up erection.
The use of sexual stimulants like Viagra has not so much to do with impotence, but with
haste, and emotional disturbances.
The electronic excitation conveyed through the entire mediascape puts the sensi-
tive organism in a state of permanent electrocution. Time for linguistic elaboration of a
single input is reduced as the number of inputs increase, and the speed of the input gets
higher. Sex is not speaking anymore. It is rather babbling, and faltering, and it is also suf-
fering for it. Too few words, too little time to talk. Too little time to feel. Porn is an essay
in emotional automation and uniformity of emotional time of response. Don’t miss the
implication between permanent electrocution, shortening of linguistic attentive elabo-
ration, atrophy of emotional response. Pornography is just the VISIBLE surface of this
neuro short-circuit.
The connective generation is showing signs of an epidemic of emotional atrophy.
The disconnection between language and sexuality is striking. Pornography is the ulti-
mate form of this disconnection.
When a group of very young guys in a northern Italian town murdered a young girl
after harassing her, the inquirers investigating the case were stunned by the inability of
the youngsters to verbalise their act, their feeling and their motivation. Syntactic elabora-
tion reduced to zero. Monosyllables. Onomatopoeic sounds.
Sensitivity is invested in this turn, and it enters a process of re-formatting: the new
format is the smooth, the connectible. Sexual imagination is overwhelmed by the hairless
smooth of the digital image. The perception of the real body of the Other in everyday life
is becoming repellent: Hard to touch, hard to feel, hard to enjoy.
This pathological turn of the psycho-sphere seems to me the main feature of the cur-
rent anthropological mutation which encompasses social change, and politics and the
global tragedy of terror that is devastating the perception of the bodies that surrounds
and touches our body.
The obsessive repetition of a gesture that is no more able to fulfil its aim, the hopeless
effort to grasp a pleasure that we have no time to nurture — all this has so much to do with
the return of violence, of war — and of torture into the scene of the world.
Both in the Western and in the Islamic world, we are undergoing a daily instigation to
fear, to aggression, to hate. The bodily imagination is disturbed by the growing all pervad-
ing ecology of fear. Although never erased from the hidden reality of history, torture has
been rejected by the consciousness and excluded from the field of social visibility. After
the defeat of Nazism, torture has been considered the ultimate mark of inhumanity.
But during the last few years, just in the dawn of the new century, torture has resur-
faced, abruptly becoming a normal tool of political action. Torturers and their accomplic-
es are officially sitting in power in the US, in Russia and in many other places. Torturers
are showing their deeds to their friends by the means of video-phonic display, and through
Internet. Beheading is proudly shown as a demonstration of bravery and religious faith.
How could it happen? Why has social sensitivity turned to such barbarism and inhu-
manity? We have to understand what is happening in the deepness of bodily perception if
we want to understand what is happening in the surface of terrorist and military action
Pornography and torture have little in common, if anything. But their media diffusion
takes place in the same vacuum generated by the atrophy of emotionality. The inability
to feel pleasure has its counterpart in the inability to perceive the horror as horror.
At the same time, some groups of women are trying to play the game of pornograph-
ic vision as a means of expressing and deconstructing the alienation that is prevalent in
mainstream porn.
The simulated multiple identity is a strategy for the mise en scène of this kind of alien-
ation. Not exactly a critique, but a form of ironic distancing. This is why I like experi-
ences like Suicide Girls.
Indieporn is a way of deconstructing the social alienation of the body. It may be in
202 C’Lick Me
many cases that it is also a way of expressing oneself. But frankly, in this case, I would
not speak of porn; I would speak of an erotic use of porn-ironic image which becomes a
detournement of the porn image.
Indieporn can be seen as a form of ironic joy where social signs are taken out of their
original context and are being subverted into something else. Because of this subver-
sion it can be changed and given another meaning. Things change when we speak of
the point of view of the ‘gaze,’ the position of the lurkers. The gaze is not ironic, there
is no sense of joy or looking for a different subverted meaning. Instead of that ironic joy
there is cynicism. The lurker is almost hopeless and emotionless in watching the porno-
graphic images on the screen. He just wants to watch, without any feeling or empathy
for the persons he is watching. Consciousness and behaviour are dissociated from each
other. This dissociation makes it impossible for the lurker to go beyond the repetition
of the pornographic act, which becomes the obsessive search of a pleasure that can no
longer be reached.
Section 3
Netporn after the Queer Boom

205
Sexy and Smart:

Black Women and the Politics
of Self-Authorship in Netporn
Mireille Miller-Young
The netporn world is a proliferation of hardcore imaginaries with vastly new possibili-
ties for the production, distribution, and interactive consumption of all kinds of fanta-
sies, including racialized fantasies. Consumers desiring to see Black women will most
likely to click their way to one of those corporate, generic, and even totally unrelated
sites like PeepShows.com that exploit the search for Black women, but do not provide
the media. The dedicated consumer would continue his or her search, most likely com-
ing across a site like ExploitedBlackTeens.com, another unimaginative netsmut site.
Here, Black teenage girls in “school girl uniforms” are lured into cheap-looking hotel
rooms for sex with small-time white boy pornographers. Although the site purports to
find young Black women on the street or in the mall — this is described in the “diary-
like” entries on each young woman by the white men who “exploit” them — most of the
models are not victimized teens, but in fact amateur porn actresses trying to advance
their careers in the adult industry by laboring in the cyberporn marketplace Some of
these young women manage to navigate the adult industry successfully, and arrive at a
point where they begin to aspire to stake a claim for themselves in cyberspace. While
Black porn actresses mainly hire a friend or associate, or allow a major production com-
pany to design their sites, a few are bold enough to learn the technology and to invest in
the hardware and software necessary for a mini digital studio to build their own interac-
tive websites.
In a netscape that tends to make invisible the narratives of Black women while it
creates their bodies hyper-visual and hyper-accessible, these self-authored professional
websites offer exciting, radical possibilities and prompt a variety of vital questions. To
what extent are websites created by Black porn stars part of what is thought to be the de-
206 C’Lick Me
mocratization of the hardcore industry via Internet technologies? How do they force us
to reconsider the place of minority communities, such as Black women and sex workers,
in the broader cyber-economy? How does the Internet constitute a space for the produc-
tion of counter-hegemonic possibilities articulated through the nexus of sexual, gender
and racial identities and practices? Can netporn craft empowered, self-defined subjects
out of the phantasmal myths and gritty surrealism of digitized hardcore? How do Black
women’s websites proffer digital interventions, or “hacks,” amount to a form of cultural
labor, suggesting new points of departure for the study of online pornography and mod-
ern Black subjectivities?
Hacking Mainstream Netporn

Like other porn workers, African American women in adult entertainment utilize digi-
tal technology to gain greater control over their labor and their representation. In con-
structing their own professional porn websites, more and more black women hardcore
performers are attempting to strategically insert themselves alongside white, Asian, and
Latino women, into positions of power within the lucrative commerce of netporn. Tacti-
cally, professional websites allow porn performers to fashion, manage, and disseminate
their images according to their interests, while also providing a vital source of income
(through monthly fan membership fees) outside of the field of hardcore video and
dance work. According to Paul Fishbein, publisher of Adult Video News, the web is
ideal for porn stars because they are “always marketing themselves,” in order to remain
competitive in the disposablizing adult industry. Moreover, their sites are part of the
overall technological evolution of porn.1
These women not only “hack” into the ecommerce of the multi billion dollar cy-
berporn industry to reap the economic benefits of the new “technology of sex,” they also
jam the network matrix of cultural codes that fetishize black bodies in (cyber)society.2
Lisa Nakamura’s scholarship riffs on the semiotics of “stereotype” as a code for the link
between technological and social reproductions with her theorization of the online re-
production of “cybertypes.”3 Cybertypes constitute mimetic transcripts of fetishized Oth-
ers that have proven indispensable to the networking of structures of representation in
cyber-society. Black women are superficially cybertyped as underclass, technophobes on
the margins of the digital revolution, or as cyberhoes that lurk in crack alleys, far from the
hustle and bustle of the information super-highway. This dialectic of attraction and dis-
avowal constructs the digital world as a racial economy of desire in which Black women’s
bodies are both invisible and hypervisible.
The expansion of pornography to the web has contributed to the massive produc-
tion, but also the regulation and prohibition of taboo racial desire in our mass public
consciousness. This desire is controlled and processed in a web of pixilated policing
through which Black bodies are constructed as liminal objects.4 Black women produced
sites expose the productive, mimetic, public, and private aspects of cyberporn as a cul-
tural technology of racial desire and disavowal. They underscore total the necessity for dy-
namic alternatives to the usual tropes of cyber-pimped ghetto booty hoes, as seen in sites
Section 3: Netporn after the Queer Boom 207
like EbonyBooty.com, GhettoGaggers.com, HoodHunters.com, and RoundAndBrown.

com.5 For these women, netporn proffers an intensely politicized space where the line
between exploitation and empowerment, pleasure and peril, community and alienation
is totally blurred. As hackers, they function to disrupt both the economic and ideological
systems of a netporn that is as deeply racialized as it is sexualized.
Indeed, the cyber-terrain forms an “interzone” for marginalized mass public desires
to be imagined, articulated, and accessed.6 Historian Kevin Mumford theorizes inter-
zones as physical, social, and psychic nodal points of interaction and creativity on the
racial/sexual border. Red light districts in the United States, Mumford explains, were cre-
ated and organized around Black and working class neighborhoods during the 1920s and
1930s, as a policy of safeguarding mass public culture from the lucrative private economy
of illicit as well as interracial sex.7 The policing and segregation of red light districts op-
erated alongside the policing and segregation of Black communities from the dominant
civil society; the threat of a visible sexual commerce was underscored by fears of the vis-
ible racial sexual economy that had historically existed in the US, with Black women’s
bodies as the primary commodity of sexual exchange during slavery and its aftermath.8
Thus, if the Internet allows for the democratization of pornography through the multiple
potentialities of creating, distributing and consuming hardcore through commercial or
peer to peer sites, the historical limits to the democratization of sex across racial borders
pose significant concerns for those of us interested in unpacking the utility of netporn
for progressive sexual politics.
Netporn and Racial Desire

Netporn has facilitated the expansion of the mass economy of desire across racial bor-
ders, and is thus both transgressive and repressive for Black sexual politics. By creating
alternative spaces of encounter, exploration, and exchange, netporn potentially under-
mines the hegemonic logic of racial sexual segregation in the US. These sites illustrate
the permeability of sexualized racial, class, and gender borders as they are reconstructed
in virtual space. At the same time, digital technology allows for mass public fetishes
of subjugated bodies to be frantically consumed in secret, and thus easily disavowed.
Bill Asher, president of Vivid Entertainment Group, one of the largest pornography
and Internet porn corporations noted that with netporn, “there’s no embarrassment fac-
tor, there’s no issue with privacy. The Internet is a personal technology and that’s very
well suited to adult entertainment.”9 This personal technology is manipulated to pro-
vide arousal, anonymity, and access to a multiplicity of fetishes, of which “ethnic girls”
are only one.
Fantasy sculpted in technoland simultaneously sustains and transverses the color
line, it is mobile and progressive, yet also stagnant and regressive. Du Bois’s prophecy
that the “problem of the twentieth century” would be “that of the color line,” is certainly
apropos for these dangerous days of the twenty-first.10 Legacies of racial capitalism en-
dure in new technologies. The taboo of interracial sexuality and the logic of deviance
around Black bodies saturate the microfibers of netporn, even while the consumer or user
208 C’Lick Me
is located in network of potentials for identification and disidentification with the object
or subject of power. At the same time, globalized capitalism maintains people of color
and women as the most exploited and expendable sectors of the mass communications
technologies workforce. At both ends of the network Black bodies labor in the context of
marginalization. The public culture of African American sexuality has historically been
policed and disciplined, and now in the Internet, it is cyber-profiled. Black women’s sexu-
ality continues to be a site of struggle over representation and control.
Black porn star websites function to transform their status as active, marketable per-
sonalities in the analog world into digital subjectivities navigating the commerce of on-
line adult entertainment. The production of netporn sexualities represents a form of
cultural labor as it decodes and encodes dominant significations and identities. The
cultural labor of Black bodies on these self-authored netporn sites subverts, or queers the
heterosexist, racist capitalism of cybercultural space.
The women’s independent self-designed sites must to compete with other porn star
sites, many of which are slick operations sponsored by production companies. They also
have to share the network of misogynist cyber-ghetto porn websites such as GhettoGag-
gers.com which advertises “gagging ghetto whores,” in extreme hardcore style, similar
to Max Hardcore. The fetish is extreme fellatio to the point of vomiting (i.e., “she was
reduced to a pile of vomit”) performed by Black women on white men who advertise
that “we destroy ghetto hoes.” In HoodHunters.com, Black men are the pornographers
who purportedly find black women in the ‘hood, convince them to have sex for cash,
film and photography the sex act, and as their narrative reveals, kick the women to the
curb without their payment. The site features graphics of Black women from the hood
(all professional actresses) standing amid chain fences, cars, and aggressive looking Black
men (saying “Let’s get it on Bitch!”). While both sites enact narrative fantasies that ob-
scure the real negotiations of consent and labor that exist behind the scenes, their con-
structions also reveal how the racialization of sexuality, and the sexualization or race in
the US imaginary posits Black women’s bodies signifies of the pleasure and danger of
the illicit erotic.11
The politics of appropriation and exploitation of Black women’s sexuality in these
sites only underscores the profound need for the insertion of Black women web authors
into the productive realm of cyberporn. The inclusion of more voices into cyberporn,
particularly by self-activated sex workers, may give rise to the transformation of sexual cy-
bertypes of Black women as fuckable objects from the street into perhaps sexual identities
that are creative, dynamic, and unexploited. The counter-fetishization of Black sexuality
by Black sex workers would of course be part of an economy of sexual racial fetishism
in hardcore, but at least holds the potential for a radical rebooting of the racial logic of
cyber-sexualities.
Black women’s culturally productive labor of staking a claim in the sexual politics
of cyberspace is especially significant because, according to my research, they tend to be
marginalized as workers in the porn industry, toiling within the lowest level of its political
economic hierarchy. Their exploitation in the hardcore industry is directly related to the
long history of the representation of Black sexuality as uniquely and fetishistically hyper-
sexual, hyper-visible, and hyper-accessible. Early visual technologies of photography and
film propelled the formation of a very specific “visual economy” of Black women as spec-
tacles of sexual deviance and pathology, which circulated in erotica, colonial scientific
photography, and the film industries between the United States and European nations.12
Technologies of looking have historically been used as modes of economic, scientific,
and political exploitation of Black women. For bodies of color, most of pornography, from
nineteenth century daguerreotypes and photographs to film reels, video and digital media
has been an extension and intensification of the colonizing gaze.
Black Women in the (Cyber)Porn Marketplace

The desire for Black sexuality in pornography was initiated as, and continues to be,
largely a product of the imagination and financial acumen of white men interested in
marketing salacious stereotypes and the taboo of interracial sex to a white male, but in-
creasing Black male, Hip Hop oriented consumer base. As the increased production of
Black and interracial hardcore videos in the 1980s and 1990s occurred, work in the por-
nography industry became a more tenable option for Black women, as it provided great-
er opportunities for them to gain employment in one of the highest status jobs in the sex
industry. With the limited range of opportunities for Black women in the increasingly
feminized and service oriented US labor market, and the especially high levels of un-
employment among young Black women the sexual economy is, for many, an attractive
labor choice.13
My interviews with former and current Black performers in the pornography industry
suggest that the leading reasons why women choose this mode of sex work include in-
terests in earning a lucrative and fast income, becoming famous, gaining independence,
accessing mobility, and exploring their sexuality. The majority of Black female perform-
ers work an average of six months to one year in the business as a way to supplement and
advance their work in other areas of the sex industry, particularly exotic dancing and es-
corting, or as a way to earn quick money for school, a car, or an apartment. Others choose
to work in the industry full time in hopes of accessing opportunities in mainstream enter-
tainment such as acting or music. Or they want to become a genuine “porn star.”
Black actors and actresses, in straight and gay porn, have consistently been offered
less than white actors and actresses — they are generally paid half to three quarters what
their white counterparts make for the same sex scenes, and their videos, tend to be of a
much lesser quality due to small budgets in the “gonzo” or “wall to wall” genres.14 As a
response to this structural inequality, Black women in pornography have become keenly
aware of how their sexuality is marketed in films that are distributed and seen all over
the world, particularly in the US and Europe. They perceive the key to becoming a porn
star in a true sense is making a name in the world of hardcore. The women I interviewed
aspired to visibility and recognition. Beyond staring roles, video box covers, magazine
layouts, and lucrative pay rates, fame means survival and perhaps even celebrity in the
mainstream entertainment world.
210 C’Lick Me
These performers perceive the web as providing exciting possibilities for economic
advancement, fame, autonomy, and control of their image, away from the contrivances
of pornographers. Hence, their websites are significant spaces for the technological re-
articulation of Black female sexuality by Black women themselves. The professional web-
sites of Black female porn actresses are indeed part of a broader “democratization” of a
hyper-connected corporate dominated adult entertainment industry in the US over the
last decade. Thousands of individuals, couples, collectives, and small companies have
appropriated the technology and inserted themselves into the hardcore cyber-market in
order to produce porn with a disruptive or alternative aesthetic to mainstream hardcore
cyber-hangouts.15 Yet, like the so-called “democratized” political economy of the US,
African American women are on the margins of what Michael Uebel calls the “metatext
of late technocapitalism.”16
While Black actresses usually maintain anywhere from ten to one hundred and fifty
memberships, with members paying $10-$20 per month, in addition to the sale of some
merchandise and digital peep shows, they do not come close to what the most successful
white actresses websites make. For example, Danni Ashe, a white porn star who has had
a website since 1995 now owns a digital production studio that now employs over forty
people and makes a profit of more than $7 million a year.17 At least $2-3 billion dollars a
year is now generated by online pornography in the US, and despite the fact that nearly
ten percent of the hardcore cyber-traffic probably visits “ethnic” or interracial porn sites,
no single Black woman porn star running her own website is making more than a mouse’s
share of the cheese.18 Nor do any have the capital to build their own state of the art pro-
duction studio.Even though they are small players in the hugely profitable game of Web
pornography, for Black actresses in the adult industry, ownership of a website is seen as
critical to access resources and opportunities that they often would not normally be able
to attain without engaging the technology.
Self-Authoring and Creating Space Online

Although Black actresses are not becoming rich with their websites, the sites do provide
a key part of their income that they can organize on their own terms, according to their
own schedule, from the comforts of home. As Kim Eternity posits as her rationale for
taking up netporn production: “I can make extra money and can do what I do best with-
out going anywhere. So naturally I was excited.”19
Performers such as Sinnamon Love, Monique, Vanessa Blue, and Kim Eternity have
created dynamic self-designed and run websites as both financial enterprises and spaces
for self-expression. Indeed, not only do their sites provide direct access to the porn con-
sumers, they also allow the production of subjectivities that are dynamic and personal-
ized versions of their professional personas in pornographic video. These women use
their sites to display their own commissioned erotic photographs for the consumption
of Internet consumers — a practice that serves to bolster their professional identities as it
functions to help them survive in the sexual marketplace of pornography.
Even in the context of the huge corporate power of porn companies and mass com-
munications conglomerates, this collective appropriation of digital technology by Black

porn actresses, holds possibilities for resistance. On the sites, they can become the ideal
of what they imagine to be glamorous, sexy, provocative, smart, and savvy. In choosing the
photographers, clothing, settings, and style of images to be exhibited in their photo and
film galleries, the performers have much more control over the production and distribu-
tion of their image than they normally would in their video or magazine work.
The continuous process of producing and posting self-designed images to their pro-
fessional websites functions as a hack into the visual economy of Black women’s bodies
in erotica. The archiving of self-authored representations in these digital spaces symbol-
izes a resistive signification project for the virtual pornoscape. Moreover, these online
subjectivities serve to highlight the intelligence, creativity, and skillfulness of the authors,
while they reflect the racial, feminist, and sex positive concerns of the sex workers. In the
introduction to enter her online fan club via iFriends.com, Kim Eternity writes:
Why a Fan Club? Because I’m sexy and smart, just like you. I know that fans like you
are key to my iFriends success. So when you join my Club (like you’re doing now), I
give you everything I’ve got — attentive, red-carpet treatment, all the way. You get it all.
Because you make me feel like a STAR! — a gorgeous, glamorous goddess! You’ve made
my day; now click ‘Access’ at right, so I can bring pleasure to yours!20
Eternity defines herself as sexy and smart, glamorous, and gorgeous; she claims a desire
to be a star. While the porn industry manufactures images of Black women as predomi-
nantly ghettoized/ghettoizing sexual vixens and marginalized in the porn star system,
Eternity’s revision of the cybertype script underlines the ways in which these women
are battling on multiple levels to compete, and to assert a more holistic or dynamic view
of their identities. Rather than just be represented as a sexualized body, Eternity high-
lights her intelligence as defining aspect of her cyber-identity. This claim demands that
consumers recognize the labor involved in self-authoring web-spaces, the kind of intel-
lectual attunement that it takes to insert oneself in the digital economy. In addition to
asserting her intelligence, Kim Eternity uses her cyberbiography on KimEternity.com to
represent herself in terms of her humanity and subjectivity:
My biography is a never-ending project of things in my life that are constantly chang-

ing. Everyday some new thought occurs that entices me into a different direction. Be-
cause of this I’m in constant personal growth. You’ll find reflections of who I am and
the person you’ll ultimately meet throughout the pages of my website which I’m totally
proud to present to you.
Eternity’s narrative of her life as a “never-ending project” and a space of “constant per-
sonal growth,” is a rich, subversive text that challenges the dominant constructions of
Black women’s lives as devalued, lacking in direction, pride, and power.
As twelve year veteran porn actress Sinnamon Love declares on one of her mul-
212 C’Lick Me
tiple self-owned and operated websites, her identity has grown beyond that of a “porn
star” and self-identified and sexually empowered “slut”; now she also happily calls her-
self a “web mistress.” The titles of Love’s websites are accurate: SinnamonLove.com,
SubmissiveFantasies.com, PleasureBroker.com, and ProfessionalDomme.com, are plat-
forms for her members only, model managing, fetish modeling, professional domination,
and high-end escort businesses. Love sees them as spaces for her to execute her web mis-
tress project of ownership, design, and control of her image, but they are also loci of the
cultural labor of self-authorship against, or in friction with, hegemonic real and virtual
views of Black womanhood.
On the flyer for her sites, Sinnamon Love bills herself as “always breaking the ste-
reotype that a woman can’t be sexually explosive and intellectual.” Like Eternity, Love
critiques the stereo (or cyber) type that women, especially sexual workers, are merely
objects of the body, rather than agents of the mind.21 Their assertion of intellectuality
strategically responds to Western technologies of race, gender, and sexuality that have
formulated lingering ontologies of Black women as wholly of the physical, sexual and
laboring body. More than a body serving the needs of capitalism and mass public fan-
tasies of racial sexual encounters in the interzones, Love argues that she has brains, and
that cyberporn viewers should recognize that as they enter her sites, they are now in a
domain of her creation.
Love’s members’ site, DiaryOfAPornstar.com, with its slick, urban, hip hop and MTV
influenced design, underscores this urgent concern for control.
You think you know, but you have no idea,” the heading prompts, pulsing to the beat,
score, and theme of the MTV celebrity reality show “The Diary Of…” The intro en-
tices the viewer in to explore and experience Love’s “Confessions, secrets, intimacy, and
passions.
Love’s site features behind the scenes and glamour photos, live private cam shows,
access to her online journal (private musings) and her writings—both creative erotic
and interviews with other celebrities (which is very important to her, since she loves to
write), professional calendar, message boards (key for corresponding with fans), event
listings, and access to the “web suite” or all her sites.
On her professional courtesan site Pleasure Broker, Love clarifies her class identity (and
class preferences) as well as her intellectualism as equally important as her sexuality:
I am a woman of leisure, a reward for elite gentlemen that know the finer things in
life…I am a gracious companion; elegant and conservative in public, yet wildly sen-
sual in private. If you are a gentleman of means that enjoys the company of a woman
that is as intelligent as she is beautiful, accept my invitation and prepare yourself for
an unforgettable experience.22
Here, the cultural labor of self-definition and identity performance is at play. According
to Nakamura, “performing alternative versions of the self and race jams the ideology-
machine,”23 Even in the context of the exploitative marketplace of capital — a defining
experience for Black bodies in (cyber)space— this kind of performance, written in her
words and visualized in her chosen images, holds exciting radical potential.
Love’s bourgeoisie class claims, narrated (and illustrated) through her performed
identity of a technophile elite courtesan diva, do the cultural work of critiquing images
of Black women’s hyper-accessibility in hardcore in relation the iconic status of white
womanhood. The ghettoization of Black femininity places their sexuality in the context
of perceived crisis, crudity, volatility and violence. For Love, claiming the status of a high-
class courtesan, and afrogeek is one way to counter the cybertypes and define her sexual-
ity as modern, progressive, and valuable.24
The websites created by Black women performers like Kim Eternity and Sinnamon
Love symbolize the crucial cultural work of hacking into the discourse machine of the
virtual landscape. In utilizing both written and visual (and even sound) articulations,
these web mistresses manipulate the capital of their bodies and sexualities for the cyber-
cultural economy with the insertion of their voices and visuality. Written biographies and
image archive galleries tell their stories, giving voice or illuminating how they got into
hardcore, their feelings about sexuality, their fantasies and frustrations. For example, porn
star Monique’s biography says:
“As a child growing up I kept many of my fantasies and desires to myself, in the closet,
sort [sic] of speak. It wasn’t until I began [exotic] dancing that I realized that many
of my fantasies were common amongst other women. The longer I danced… the more
I learned about myself and sexuality and even had my first girl-girl experience… The
exciting world of porn soon began after that. The role playing, clothes, makeup, shoes,
and sex I enjoyed very much, and still do.”25
For Black women in America we have a long history of keeping our fantasies and desires
in the closet Monique speaks of. As Black queer scholars have pointed out, “closets” are
not all the same, and for young Black women growing up in a society that has tied our
sexuality, gender, and race to our oppression, we learned to keep silences about our fan-
tasies and desires.26
This tactic of protection, or “culture of dissemblance,” as Darlene Clark Hine posits,
common among African American women has given rise to a problematic sexual politics
invested in conforming to a hetero-patriarchal status quo.27 Instead, Monique makes a
critical intervention by shouting down the repressive silences of the cult of respectabil-
ity. She clearly links her personal growth around sexuality to the experience of sex work.
Within that stigmatized community and through her own erotic labor, she came to be
affirmed in the value of her queer desires. Monique narrates her transition from erotic
dance and sexual experimentation to porn as at once affirming her non-heteronormative
sexuality choice that she was in control to make.
Of course the silent gaps in Monique’s narrative also signal the ways in which the
214 C’Lick Me
structure of the biographical porn website may be limited in its ability to allow for a safe
space for expression of real life exigencies. In virtual life, however, Monique reveals that
pleasures are also found in the performance of porn star glamour. The role play, make up
and clothes seem to satiate a desire to hack sexual morals and gender codes, while they
embody a need for the cultural labor of creative play and self-reclamation.
Cyberbiographies are rich sites of inquiry, as they are claims to subjectivities in an
instable technological terrain. They elucidate the ways in which these netporn websites
are ephemeral glimpses into one person’s life hustling to go digital. Moreover, they are
primary sites where sexual, racial and other minorities who can access the media may
express politics and pleasures that are not only policed by the dominant culture and the
state, but also their own communities.
In general the adult entertainment industry thrives off the disposability of (primar-
ily women) sex workers — especially women of color who are seen as less valuable and
marketable than white women.
These windows into the lives and aspirations of multiply marginalized sometimes of-
ten reveal the profound frustration of discrimination in the industry and the high stakes
of survival. For of these Black women any space to gain control precious, and their ap-
propriations of technologies of desire to reflect on themselves, to grow, or to just make
a living are fundamentally political acts. This labor is incredibly insightful for the ways
in which all Black women may engage new technologies and mass media culture. The
insertion of entrepreneurial-minded Black sex workers into the hardcore cyber market-
place has had a profound impact on these women’s senses of professional and personal
identity and power.
There is no question that these porn stars’ slow insertion into netporn marks a criti-
cal moment in the evolution of the industry. What remains to be seen is how far these
Black porn star tech pioneers will go in expanding their production and distribution of
webspace, and to what extent they will maintain autonomy or fall to the pressures to
meld with corporate porn media. As technology develops, and these women continue to
gain access to and appropriate new modes of digital articulation, how will their racial,
sexual, gender and class identities be reconstituted and performed? Can they gain com-
parable visuality as sites about dominant white porn stars or corporate run media, and will
this iconographical retooling really transform the hegemonic representational politics
around Black bodies and sexualities? What new meanings will be inscribed into race and
sexuality as techno-future unfolds? Hopefully, Black porn stars will have a say.
notes
1 Kushner, D. (1998) “Debbie does HTML,” Village Voice vol. 43, no. 40, 6, Oct,
p. 47; O’Toole, L. (1998) Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire, New York,
Serpent’s Tail.
2 Dery, M. (1993) “Black to the Future: Afrofuturism 1.0,” Flame Wars, Durham,
Duke; Nelson, A., et al. eds, Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life (New
York: NYU Press, 2001); Beth Kolko et al eds., Race in Cyberspace (New York:
Routledge, 2000); On the “technology of sex,” Michel Foucault, The History of
Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980).
3 Nakamura, L. (2002) Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, New
York, Routledge.
4 Sharpe, C.E. (19990 “Racialized Fantasies on the Internet,” Signs: Journal of Wom-
en in Culture and Society, vol. 24, no. 4; Warner, M. (1993) “The Mass Public and
the Mass Subject,” The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. B. Robbins, Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota Press, p. 242.
5 Uebel, M. (2000) “Toward a Symptomatology of Cyberporn,” Theory and Event,
vol. 3, no. 4; Kipnis, L. (1996) Bound and Gagged: Pornography and Politics of Fan-
tasy in America, Durham, Duke; Luke, T. (1997) “Digital Beings & Virtual Times:
The Politics of Cybersubjectivity,” Theory and Event, vol. 1, no. 1.
6 Uebel, ibid; Mumford, K. (1997) Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago
and New York in the Early Twentieth Century, New York, Columbia.
7 Mumford Ibid.
8 Mumford Ibid; See also, Carby, H. (1992) “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an
Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry 18, pp. 738–755.
9 PBS Frontline American Porn, “Interview With Bill Asher,” (2002) http://www.pbs.
org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/interviews/asher.html, 2 April 2003.
10 Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago, A.C. McClug and Co.;
Hall, S. (2003) “The White of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies of the Media,” Gender,
Race, and Class in Media: A Text-Reader, 2d edn, eds. G. Dines and J.M. Humez,
Thousand Oaks, C.A.: Sage Publications.
11 On the racialization of sexuality and the sexualization of race see, Shimizu, C.P.
(2006) “Sex for Sale: Queens of Anal, Double, Triple, and the Gang Bang: Produc-
ing Asian/American Feminism in Pornography,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism,
18: pp. 235.
12 Poole, D. (1997) Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean
Image World, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press; Willis, D. and Williams,
C. (2002) The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
13 In 1990 Black women were five times more likely to be in poverty and three times
more likely to be unemployed than white women: USCCR, 121. The USCCR Re-
port includes statistical analysis of the 1970-87 March Current Population Surveys
(CPS), the 1940-1980 Public Use Samples of the Censuses of Population, and the
1984 Panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).
14 Gonzo is porn shot to highlight interaction with the performer and the camera, in
a reality TV style, while wall to wall is porn shot, usually by amateur and pro-am
companies that includes just sex, rather than a plot or characterization such as in
“feature” videos.
15 Brunker, M. ”Sultans of Smut,” MSNBC Aug. 9, 2000, <http://www.msnbc.com/
216 C’Lick Me
news/438846.asp?cp1=1> , 10 December 2002.

16 Uebel, ibid.
17 Bruckner, ibid. See also, PBS Frontline, American Porn, “Interview with Danni
Ashe,” (2002) <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/interviews/
ashe.html> , 2 April 2003.
18 This is my estimation. See also: Al Cooper, et al, “Sexuality in Cyberspace: Update
for the 21st Century,” CyberPsychology & Behavior, vol. 3, no. 4 (2000), pp. 521-
536.
19 These women use their sites to display their own commissioned erotic photographs
for the consumption of Internet consumers—a practice that serves to bolster their
professional identities as it functions to help them survive in the sexual marketplace
of pornography.
20 Kim Eternity, Ibid.
21 Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: In-
diana; Emmett, A. (1998) “Sex and Gender as Raw Political Material,” Sex Roles,
vol. 39, no. 718, pp. 503-513.
22 Sinnamon Love, (2002) <www.pleasurebroker.com>, 3 Jan 2003. This website
is currently being consolidated as part of new main site Sinnamon will release in
2007.
23 Nakamura, ibid. See also, Kibby, M. (2001) “ Women and Sex Entertainment on
the Internet: Discourses of Gender and Power,” Mots Pluriels, 19, Oct., <http://arts.
uwa.edu.au/Mots Pluriels/MP1901mk.html>, 1 September 2005.
24 On Afrogeeks, see the work of Anna Everett, “The Revolution Will Be Digitized:
Afrocentricity and the Digital Public Sphere,” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 2, (Summer
2002): 125-146; Everett, (2004) “On Cyberfeminism and Cyberwomanism: High-
Tech Mediations of Feminism’s Discontents” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society, vol. 30, pp. 1278–2000. Also, see her organized conferences on the
politics of afrogeek-dom: <http://research.ucsb.edu/cbs/projects/afrogeeks.html>.
25 Monique: <http://moniquesweb.com/guests/bio.html>.
26 See the work of Cheryl Clarke, E. Patrick Johnson, Dwight McBride, Rod Fergu-
son, Kara Keeling, Marlon M. Bailey, and Jackie Goldsby for example.
27 Darlene, C. H. (1990) “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle
West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in Unequal Sisters,
eds. E.C. Du Bois and V.L. Ruiz, New York, Routledge.
217
Porn Arousal and Gender Morphing

in the Twilight Zone
Katrien Jacobs
“Not Tonight Darling, I’m Online”

This essay investigates the role of digital media in rewiring our sexual desires and ani-
mal responses to Internet pornography. It gives an overview of clinical experiments in
porn arousal studies and then questions them because they rely on outdated notions
of spectatorship and gender. There has been a tendency in the mass media to rein-
force paranoid insights about the effects of pornography on our psyche and relation-
ships. Journalists are reporting on Internet pornography as one of our worst types of
media addiction, writing stories about the increasingly harsh effects of porn regimes on
“male” porn addicts and their frustrated “female” partners. For instance, in an ardent
plea against pornification, or web users being negatively affected by pornographic me-
dia, Adrian Turpin argues that pornography is now clinically proven to be the crack co-
caine of the Internet. He uses statistics from the Internet filter company N2H2 to prove
the steady growth of Internet porn sites. These statistics show that the number of porn
sites reached 260 million in 2003, up from 14 million in 1998, and that porn sales hit
$2.5 million in 2005, over double the sales of music downloads.1
Turpin describes the effects of the Internet porn boom on users by featuring “Mi-
chael,” a typical netporn “beast” who is addicted to porn browsing and has a dodgy sexual
relationship with his wife. To prove the correlation between his media addiction and
sexual neglect, he quotes Anne Layden, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s
Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program, who has found that exposure to porn im-
ages directly alters brain waves: “Even non-sex addicts will show brain reactions on PET
(Positron Emission Tomography) scans while viewing pornography similar to cocaine
218 C’Lick Me
addicts looking at images of cocaine.”2

To Turpin, this line of research shows that the human brain is hardwired to crave por-
nography. Watching porn is like binge drinking or eating junk food, it releases a chemi-
cal in the body that asks for more of the same. Another point of inspiration for Turpin is
Pamela Paul’s neo-conservative bestseller Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming our
Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families (2005). Paul is a former liberal who came up
with an urgent anti-porn message based on a number of interviews with porn users and
their social circles. The book features women complaining about male consumption and
men confessing their lack of gusto. Turpin’s article ends with a cry of despair about the
negative effects of netporn on children, minors and adults.
However, as the essay will show, the thrust of lurid journalism needs to be tempered.
The essay will use theories of gender and spectatorship in new media environments to
speculate about the complex and morphing identities of aroused porn browsers. The es-
say will thus suggest alternative ways of living and breathing with pornification.
The Empirical Scientist’s Aroused Subjects

The question as to how pornographic images affect brain waves and what the different
arousal levels are between men and women, has long fascinated the field of sexology.
Several generations of researchers have tried to measure quantitative responses using
advanced technological methods, either by recording changing brain-wave responses, or
by asking subjects to write down reactions in different kinds of surveys — the SOS (Sex-
ual Opinion Survey), the VRQ (Video Reaction Questionnaire) or the SFQ (Sexual
Fantasy Questionnaire).The experiments simulate an intimate home environment and
expose subjects to various types of pornography in order to test responses.
In “Selecting Films for Sex Research: Gender difference in Erotic Film Preference” — a
study carried out in the psychophysiology lab of the Kinsey Institute in 2003 — the re-
searchers set out to measure whether men have a different porn drive from women.3
They reviewed evidence from older studies that showed that men and women differ in
their responses to sexual stimuli. But as these older studies were based on the subjects’
exposure to male-centered pornography only, the research team were wary of the results.
Hence, in the 2003 experiment, they included female-friendly porn selections when
testing a student group of heterosexual males and females. They found that women re-
sponded indeed more positively to the presentation of female-friendly films selected by
female researchers, in comparison to more typical mainstream and male-centered film
clips selected by the males. But even though the women reported positively to the female
selections, they did not report arousal levels comparable to those of men.
In a 2004 study “A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal,” researchers
posited a more rigorous recording of sex difference, showing that sex arousal is category-
specific in men, whereas women show little category-specificity in their porn arousal pat-
terns. Once again, researchers set out to measure different reactions in female and male
subjects, this time including people who identify as either heterosexual, gay, lesbian or
transsexual. Their work cited a previous body of work, which showed that female sexual-
ity is generally more flexible than male sexuality, with greater intra-individual variation
in preferences, behaviours, attitudes and responsiveness to cultural influences. The 2004
study retested this thesis, this time digitising the experiment by using a MP100WS data-
acquisition unit and the Acknowledge software. Male genital arousal was assessed with
penile plethysmography, using a mercury-in-rubber strain gauge to measure changes in
the circumference of the penis as erection developed. The genital arousal of women and
MTF transsexuals was assessed via a change in vaginal pulse amplitude (VPA) with a
vaginal photoplethysmograph. In addition, subjective arousal or lack thereof was assessed
continuously through self-reporting by using a lever moving through a 180-degree arc.
The researchers acknowledged that their subjects, women more so than men, were of-
ten reluctant to be tested genitally, and that their responses may have been influenced by
an amount of refusal to react. Thus, a second study was carried out that asked subjects to
fill out questionnaires. Both psychophysiological data and survey tests amounted to similar
results — women were less category-specific in their porn arousal levels. They had lower
arousal levels then men and enjoyed a wider variety of porn. The researchers were incon-
clusive about whether or not these sex differences were inborn or culturally constructed.
A second type of arousal study sets out to record differences between sexual nor-
malness and deviancy. In the 2003 study “EEG responses to Visual Erotic Stimuli in
Men with Normal and Paraphilic Interests,” sixty-two white, right-handed heterosexual
males were divided into “normal” vs. “paraphilic” males. Paraphilic subjects were de-
fined as those interested in scenes of transvestism, fetishism and sado-masochism, and
were sought in special interest clubs and through announcements in niche magazines.4
The study used “EEG” or Electroencephalography to capture neurophysiologic mea-
surements of the electrical activity of the brain. These measurements were recorded from
electrodes placed on the scalp and/or on the cortex. As the researchers write, the first
EEG study was carried by Lifshitz in 1966, who measured the effects on males of artistic
depictions of nude women, compared with pictures of ulcerated legs.
The study worked with the method of EEG analysis because it was based on the hy-
pothesis that “normal” and “paraphilic” subjects get stimuli from different hemispheres
of the brain. Whereas the right hemisphere initiates emotionality, aggression and sexual
arousal, it does so under regulatory control of the left hemisphere, which includes sexual
triggers in the format of verbal cues, rituals and scenarios. The researchers believed that
the left-hemisphere could indicate an underlying deviation from normal arousal pattern
activity, and wanted to test the presence of paraphilic tendencies in subjects.
The right-handed males were asked to fill out a SFQ (Sexual Fantasy Questionnaire)
and were then seated in a comfortable chair. They were wired with 1-cm diameter elec-
trodes on their scalp and around their right eye to measure the EEG responses. They
were exposed to slides (projected with a good old Kodak Carousel), showing a mixture
of 57 heteronormative slides, 57 paraphilic slides, and 57 neutral slides (e.g., landscapes
and street scenes).
The findings of the study overturned the researchers expectations; the normal males
were aroused by normal stimuli, but the paraphilic males were aroused by both normal
220 C’Lick Me
and paraphilic stimuli. The researchers had assumed that the paraphilics would have a
lack of interest in normal sex scenes, but they were proven wrong. However, the experi-
ment confirmed that certain parts of the left brain hemisphere were more stimulated in
the paraphilic group: parts that they located as the seedbed of fantasies as social scenarios,
role-plays, and rituals, as well as the psychology of social shame and awareness. “Normal”
heterosexual arousal was confirmed to be primarily located in the right brain areas.
The remainder of the essay will question the validity of both types of tests from the
history of arousal studies. First of all, one could state some obvious objections like the fact
that these test environments don’t appear to be very stimulating and may be off-putting
to a degree that they become totally useless. Or the question of whether arousal patterns
to porn are innate or culturally constructed. One of the obvious differences between
the subjects, or between men and women, is that they may have delayed or hidden re-
sponses to porn images that may be impossible to capture. Even though the studies work
with surveys to measure subjective statements, can they capture the complex workings
of human sexual memory and fantasies? When people react to porn images, their sexual
stimulation also stems from memories of past experiences, or random fantasies that filter
into the present, mediated moment of porn viewing.
The essay will look at post-binary concepts of sex and gender and the use of non-quan-
titative research methods to diagnose how web users may be turned on and/or communi-
cate arousal in response to porn. Regardless of their gender or interest in normal sex, web
users are experiencing a rewiring of the sex brain, which involves activity stemming from
a cross-over region between femininity and masculinity, and between normal and deviant
types of agency. Moreover, there has been a boom of indie porn movements on the web
that caters to a different type of consumer and has a mainstream appeal, including porn
made by transgendered activists and producers. But rather than relying on interviews or
empirical evidence, the essay proposes theory and participatory Internet research meth-
ods to conjecture about these emergence patterns of arousal and interactivity.
Soft Arousal: The Lover Who Endlessly Talks

Internet porn viewing differs from cinematic porn viewing in that spectators are encour-
aged to reach climax in response to porn as visual stimuli while they are chatting with
other people. Web users can download and watch porn while exchanging chit-chat,
with each other, while talking to sex workers through a webcam, or while showing their
own bodies through webcams and acting out sexual personas. The processing of visual
information is moderated by a wide range of speech acts or digital imaging techniques
depending on the different technological settings and encounters. I would argue that
this type of porn consumption produces a state of soft arousal, as detailed in the book
webAffairs, written by a female artist and scholar under the pseudonym Show-n-tell.5
WebAffairs gives an overview of Show-n-tell’s arousal in a chatroom and her reactions
to sexually explicit images. The book has large collections of webcam photographs and
details of ongoing correspondences. Show-n-tell collects an extensive collection of im-
ages of the bodies and body parts of her chat partners — facial glows, erect penises, naked
Figure 1. Vaginal Photoplethysmograph, instrument used on women on MTF trans-
sexual to measure arousal
Figure 2. Diagram of stimulation during porn arousal

Figure 3. 1966 Lifshitz experiment, comparing arousal reactions to nude women
and ulcerated legs
Figure 4. 2003 experiment, comparing arousal reactions to heteronormative, paraphilic

and neutral slides
buttocks, hairy chests, and promising bosoms. She also documents the moments where
people make special dates to show off their special fetishes or paraphilic interests, such
as a man who wants to show off an elaborate rubber fetish costume, or a cross-dresser
who wants to show female lingerie.
Is Show-n-tell a typical feminine or masculine consumer with an ability to be aroused
by these phantasmogoric displays and chats? Do the chat logs show that males and fe-
males have different arousal patterns? To which degree are males in chatrooms still in-
nately animalistic or culturally trained to be aroused by visual stimuli? Show-n-tell sets
out to answer some of these questions as she performs a double-role — she gathers data
while responding to the desires of others. She narrates the peculiarities of her web af-
fairs and analyses them afterwards; hence both her performative and analytical voices
are present in the book.
WebAffairs demystifies the profile of the straight male as a porn beast. For example,
in the early stages of the project, she asks men to point their cameras away from their
bodies and erections into their home spaces, and finds that men love to get this kind of
unusual attention.
The chatters are personally, physically and emotionally involved in the act of making
and sharing data. Sometimes they help each other work through personal relationship
issues. Other times, they invite each other to have sex and conversation in private rooms,
but these can also be largely non-sexual. At one point, she has an extensive humorous
conversation with an older sexually estranged male and encourages him to get his wife
involved. Show-n-tell herself is a married woman who performs sex while her husband
sits next to her working away on his own computer. She often discusses her chats and on-
going cyber relationships with him or asks him how far she can go in her diary of evolv-
ing desires.
Show-n-tell’s research shows that people develop unique and complex relationships
that are determined by a manipulation of pornographic images. Since it is assumed that
males will have a larger impulse to crave the naked bodies of females, some of the cha-
trooms are administered by certain rules. Some are anarchic while others are polite or
women-friendly rooms with stricter rules for males. For instance, polite rooms prohibit
men from displaying their genitals and/or inviting a woman into private rooms. The idea
is to make women feel more comfortable and to boot out any potential obnoxious men.
Since polite rooms have a larger percentage of women to men, men tend to line up for
them trying to get in. Show-n-tell tries out the polite rooms for a while, but in the end she
finds them too forced: “I eventually stopped going to these rooms because it seemed too
hypocritical to be participating in an adult room and yet be offended by nudity. Isn’t that
what we already do in real life: keep sex apart from the rest of our daily life and define it
offensive when it is expressed in public?”6 She prefers to interact with people’s unadul-
terated performances whether they include sex or not.
Lastly, as Show-n-tell’s case study shows, performers on the web have alter-egos and
develop discursive strategies and behavioural traits that are unique to their new personas.
Thus, arousal is based on constructed notions of identity, sexual preference and gender.
224 C’Lick Me
Show-n-tell engages in excessive sexual communication and pornographic exhibition-

ism and voyeurism. She is also committed to acting out complex layers of porn identity.
What matters within these encounters is a consensual sharing of sexual experiments,
joys, disappointments or satisfaction. In light of these layered identities and fluctuating
encounters, would it remain possible to measure female and male chatters, or normal
and paraphilic subjects? Are males and females adopting similar multi-layered types of
sexual behaviour in the chatroom?
Morphing Genders and the Variety-Fuck

We could resort to post-binary concepts of gender to get an understanding of arousal.
As Ken Plummer explains in the foreword to Blending Genders, even though most of
us uphold a solid idea of gender as a binary split between male and female, gender
is also seen as a concept that is shifting, ambiguous and fleeting. As such, it is one of
most contested concepts in the social sciences and contemporary political struggles. But
anthropologists have demonstrated the cultural relativities of gender, and sociologists
have shown that genders are socially constructed through material and cultural condi-
tions. Moreover, there has been research on the larger cultural impact of individuals
and communities that cross gender lines.7
In “We are So Much More then our Naked Boobies,” Marije Janssen uses feminist
theories to analyse how a new wave of “alt porn” girls use performative mechanism to
denaturalise gender. Janssen refers to Luce Irigaray’s notion of “mimicry,” or the stark
reiteration of dogmatic clichés as a means of questioning gender within dominant dis-
courses. For Irigaray, it is important to think of modes of femininity as they have been
drawn within dominant discourses and image regimes. As one cannot formulate a langu-
age outside of these discourses, it is important for women to enact and mimic their roles
within existing discourses. As for the DIY portraits of alt porn, web users can deliberately
assume and perform feminine roles, which could then convert a form of predictability
into an affirmation, and allow a thwarting of these roles. We can see instances of feminine
mimicry in Eon Mc Kai’s popular alt porn movie Neu Wave Hookers, where sex work-
ers deliberately act out clichés. In this movie, typical porn numbers are alternated with
non-pornographic scenes that make viewers aware of the constructed nature of the sex
bomb. For instance, the models show typical expressions of bliss and satisfaction when
they are being ejaculated upon, but they show theatrical and surreal poses when shot
behind the scenes.
Judith Butler has criticised the position of Irigaray and theorised the possibility of gen-
dermorphing, or the use of performativity as innumerable sexes. Butler uses the concept
of masquerade to argue that people can take on different identities by adopting gender
codes. Janssen suggests that this theory holds special value in the online world, where
people are more likely to take on parallel or alternate identities, whether real or virtual,
by replacing one profile or nickname with another. Specifically, she looks at Butler’s in-
terpretation of the psycho-analysis of Jacques Lacan, who reviewed the role of adopting
the phallus in relation to male and female identity. According to Lacan, the phallus is
Figure 5. (Above) Show-n-tell and Mike Mandel, Suzy, ceramic and glass mosaic tile
mural with video screen embedded, 12x 13 feet temporary installation at GASP gallery,
Boston, 2005
Figure 6. (Below) Show-n-tell and Mike Mandel, GASP wall detail2, Shygirl, digital
video, 1:32min, Chantal Zakari, 2005
Figure 7. Buckangel, Buckangel Entertainment, Leather 1, 2005
Figure 8. Buckangel, Buckangel Entertainment, Fire 2, 2005
228 C’Lick Me
the primary signifier of the subject, as opposed to the biological penis. It is a signifier that
can be detached from the male body and can be adopted by women. Women can steal
the phallus and reconstruct identitities, but they can only work once affirmed by males
and masculine culture. Butler places this kind of masquerade outside the framework of
binary gender roles and male affirmation. For her, masquerade is seen as a way to dena-
turalise authentic forms of desire/arousal, and foreseeing endless possibilities of gender
that do not need masculine affirmation.8
In addition to Butler’s theories of performativity, a school of cyberfeminists sees the
networked body as a pragmatic interface. Rosi Braidotti argues that people can use medi-
ated spaces and identities to reverse the patriarchal order and try out mimetic strategies
of gender. Unlike Butler, Braidotti is more skeptical about the concept of the transfer-
able phallus or of our ability to adopt an endless variety of gender codes. One cannot
revolutionise gender so easily even though one can more easily play with its codes using
new technologies. A real change of gender identification would take time and require
hard work, pain and effort.9
By adopting these theories of performativity and gender morphing, one can under-
stand how modern subjects denaturalise gender by adopting codes of (hyper) masculinity
or femininity. Fifteen years ago, Donna Haraway equally predicted a trend towards mor-
phing subjectivities in “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Femi-
nism in the Late Twentieth Century.” According to Haraway, women would be able to
fight oppression by transcending biological determinism and making new alliances with
technological data and changing animal behaviours.10 The web has meanwhile made
room for feminine mimicry, gender-fluid modeling and FTM porn stars who denatu-
ralise binary gender codes.
“You have seen chicks with dicks, now come see a dude with a pussy,” proclaims
Buckangel of Buckangel.com. Buck wants to “change the face of porn” by constructing
a profile that merges hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity — a tattooed and muscular
torso, large moustache and retro style sunglasses, along with a decidedly slutty “cunt”
pride. Buck was born as a bio-female and later became a FTM transexual who likes raun-
chy sex. He emphasises his authentic female genital, but adds layers of masculinity. He
is now a “man with a cunt,” and declares that “two holes are better than one.” Buck also
likes to get fucked in both holes.
We see a further mixing of female and male attributes in his ability to “variety-fuck”
his sex partners: “See buck fuck guys, gals and she-males.” We can see it in a range of
photos: Buck is sucking cock, Buck is smoking a cigar while looking at a dildo going into
his/her pussy, Buck is kissing a woman’s breast, Buck is being penetrated in the vagina
by a man. Buck is really getting it on in every possible way and shows a flexibility and
willingness to arouse both biological and transgender females and males, as long as they
can also get aroused by his performance of roughneck masculinity.
Nofauxxx.com is a porn site that equally wants its models and voyeurs to denaturalise
binary gender codes. The site offers “cute pin-up girls, hot boys, chubby chicks, gorgeous
BBW babes, steaming hot couples, punk, goth, hippy, natural, pierced, tatooed, shaved
and unshaven models, sexy trans-gender/transexxual models (FTM & MTF), erotica,
straight, gay, lesbian and bi-sexual models, black models, asian models, soft-core, hard-
core and realistic S/M and bondage” One could argue that both these sites use the portal
model of commercial porn to offer excessive choices, but the selections consistently ad-
dress a shifting of gender codes. As we can read in www.nofauxxx.com policies for mod-
els: “No Fauxxx has no “boy” and “girl” categories, and for a reason. We believe that, for
many people, genitals have nothing to do with gender or gender expression. We do have
many trans and genderqueer models, and we ask that you respect them by referring to
them by their preferred pronouns (“he,” “she,” or “ze” are the most common, and it will
be specified in the model’s bio) if you’re blessed with the chance to interact with them
on our message boards or through other means. If there are any reports of abuse or disre-
spect to any model for any reason, action will be taken to remove you from the message
boards, and if necessary, the site.”11 The site asks its membership to question their innate
or culturally conditioned notions of gender.
Web users are invited into acts of gender morphing in alternative, amateur and online
queer porn sites. The morphing spectator may be a web user who surfs and wanders into
novel sex cultures and pleasures. S/he may also be a “cross-voyeur” who peruses selec-
tions beyond the boundaries of his/her niche site of gender and sexual orientation. One
well-known example of such “cross-voyeurism” would be the Japanese softcore anima-
tion yaoi/shounen-ai, which portrays gay sex scenes or “boy love” for female consumers.
Their “lesbian” counterparts are called yuri/ shoujo-ai, and can be seen as a new type of
soft arousal for males.
Both lesbian and gay images made for cross-voyeurs are a refreshing change from the
sexist and violent premises of most hentai. As Philip Mak explains in his shoujo-ai data-
base, people like shoujo-ai to adopt feminine feelings of affectionate desire: “For some of
those who have a soft spot for warm-and-fuzzy-feeling romantic stories, it is the appeal of
seeing a nice girl-girl relationship, which while not rare, is also not as common in anime
fanfiction as some of us would like … Others get bored with predictable everyday situa-
tions in anime fanfiction, where the roles in relationships are clear cut: the man’s job is
to defend, provide food and shelter and be manly, while the woman’s job is to support
the man, keep the food and shelter straight, and be demure. In a lesbian relationship,
these roles are not clear cut at all; the relationship becomes exciting and unpredictable
again.”12 Mak believes that these lesbian bodies and relationships may attract male view-
ers who want to see a shift in bi-polar gender relations.
New Models for Netporn Research: Hybrid-Hybrid Professor

These new types of identification with Internet data and morphing animal behaviours
could also be extended to Internet research methodologies. In this way, we can supple-
ment or critically question empirical data in sexology. In “The Other Game Researcher,”
Marinka Copier questions scientific paradigms in media studies and discusses the possi-
bilities of boundary-work, a term used in Science and Technology Studies to discuss the
formation of artificial boundaries between “scientific” and “non-scientific” knowledge.13
230 C’Lick Me
Whereas boundary-essentialists favor a strict definition and application of science, con-

structivists argue that separations of science and non-science are social conventions.
As Copier explains: “Essentialists do boundary-work, constructivists watch it get done
by people in society.” Copier favors the researcher as a “hybrid-hybrid,” someone who
combines the profiles of researcher and actively engaged participant, as opposed to the
essential and neutral scholar of scientific knowledge. She refers to the example of fan
scholarship in media studies, where scholars have long acknowledged the possibility of
being a devoted fan of media and poignant researcher at the same time.
The hybrid-hybrid profile of scholarship allows scholars to explore particular sites and
step in and out of fieldwork. Researchers can acknowledge their own shifting identities
and ask the question: “Is it possible to be a detached neutral scholar when confronted
with fleeting naked subjects?” Sexology could update its antiquarian research methods,
become less aroused by its fancy tools and technologies, and more involved in discussions
about the quotidian state of soft arousal.
notes
1 Fig. 1 through to Fig. 4 are available on the web and reproduced under the
Fair Use provision of US copyright law Some parts of the text will appear in her
forthcoming book Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2007). In his Onanism 2.0 blog Nicholas Carr has a dialogue with Seth
Finkelstein about the validity of Turpin’s statistics. They are deemed unreliable as
they were issued by the N2H@ censorware company as part of global publication
relations campaign. See http://sethf.com.ifothoughts/blogf/archives/000424.html
and http://roughtype.com/archives/2006/03/onanism_20.php.
2 Turpin, A. (2006) “Not Tonight Darling, I am Online,” Financial Times, 31 april
2006, http://www.ft.com.
3 Janssen E., D. Carpenter and C. Graham (2003) “Selecting Films for Sex Re-
search: Gender Differences in Erotic Film Preference,” Archives of Sexual Behav-
ior, 32 (3), pp. 243-251.
4 Waismann R., P. Fenwick, G. Wilson, T. Hewett, J. Lumsden et al., (2003) “EEG
responses to Visual Erotic Stimuli in Men with Normal and Paraphilic Interests,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior, 32 (2), pp. 135-144.
5 Show-n-tell (2005) webAffairs, with an essay by Allucquere Rosanne Stone (Eigh-
teen Publications: Boston, MA).
6 Show-n-tell (2005) webAffairs, with an essay by Allucquere Rosanne Stone (Eigh-
teen Publications: Boston, MA), 43.
7 Ekins, R and D. King eds. (1996) Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-dress-
ing and Sex-changing. New York: Routledge, pp. xiii-xvii.
8 Janssen M., (2006) “We are so much more then our naked boobies: The Use of
Sexual Agency by Young Feminists in Online Pornographic Communities” Masters
Thesis, University of Utrecht, Utrecht.
9 Ibid.
10 Haraway, D. (1991) “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Fem-

inism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinven-
tion of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp. 149-181.
11 Nofauxxx mission statement http://www.nofauxxx.com/tour/mission.htm.
12 The Philip Mak Shoujou-ai archive http://www.shoujoai.com/.
13 Copier M, (2003) “The Other Game Researcher” In: Copier M. and Raessens J.
eds. Level Up! The proceedings of the Digital Games Research Conference at Utre-
cht University, pp. 404-420.
233
Ssspread.com:
The Hot Bods of Queer Porn
Barbara DeGenevieve
I was the content provider for Ssspread.com — a prime porn site for hot femmes, studly
butches, and lots of gender-fuck—which I started with a friend in 2001. What you’re see-
ing is a brief twenty minute compilation of seven out of one-hundred-and-fifty-one vid-
eos I shot over the three years the site was in operation. This is a test. I know how hard it
is to think and watch porn at the same time, so pay attention!
Looking back after three years of making porn for Ssspread, what I found more fasci-
nating than anything else was how little difference there was between straight and queer
porn, except for one thing: the bodies. The bodies of queer porn are insubordinate, dis-
obedient, unruly, i only interested in having people perform the kinds of sex acts they
were comfortable with, and this strategy actually lead to a very interesting variety of
scenes. “Actors” were paid $75 per person per shoot. This is obviously very little, but in
the three years we operated, we didn’t even earn back our initial investment, so I appre-
ciated that everyone was willing to do this for so little. The fact that so many were inter-
ested in this project because they felt it was important was what kept me going for three
years (from January 2001 through to Valentine’s day 2004), and this was the reason it was
a difficult decision to finally shut it down.
I witnessed a “community” of people who were proud of their bodies and weren’t
afraid to put them on display for others to recognize and enjoy. Having had major body
issues most of my life, I was fascinated by the total lack of discomfort or self consciousness.
The FTMs, particularly those who were only hormonally altered with no upper body
surgery were mesmerizing. And they were letting me look, videotape, pull stills from the
video, and then let others look. Queer porn is a place where anything goes, where every-
thing is possible, where each body is objectified and fetishized because it wants to be.
234 C’Lick Me
Queer bodies create a world of difference in the way they enact everything from vanilla
sex, to masculinity, to blood sports, to violence. Queer porn is democracy at its best.
Beyond the bodies of its subjects and the desire for those bodies by its viewers, there
are actually many more similarities than I would have imagined between queer and
straight porn. (Perhaps the difference in bodies is so huge as to make the similarities seem
irrelevant.) It is the complexity of the cultural narrative in the performance of sex in any
kind of pornography that I find so compelling. Unless the scene I was shooting was simply
two women taking their clothes off and having “lesbian” sex, there was an overwhelming-
ly hetero (male/female) and gay (male/male) narrative embedded in the scenes. It wasn’t
until I started to deconstruct what I was seeing, that I realized how prevalent it was.
In a sort of feminist sense, queer porn is politically correct for queers because queer
bodies are in it having queer sex. But the scenarios that these queer bodies engage in are
those that feminists inveighed against for at least twenty-five years. When did it become
OK for two women to have multiple-holed penetrative sex? to fetishize the penis? to strap
on a dildo and have a female partner engage in fellatio? To hyper-sexualize femmes and
call it queer? Or to have a male born person identifying as a pre-op female transsexual
strap on a dildo and fuck a butch dyke identifying as a trannie-boy in his pussie. Or to
have a trannie boy who was a butch dyke get fucked in the ass by a gay man. Of course
this isn’t the full range of gender variations and combinations. I’m certainly not com-
plaining, but having been a feminist since the mid-1970s, an anti-porn feminist I might
add until 1988, I’m absolutely astonished (and parenthetically thrilled) at the way things
have entirely reversed direction.
This seems so right to me — the gender fluidity that embraces every historical aspect
of every kind of sexual act between two or more people despite their gender or sexual
orientation.
I still have to ask — are we all hard-wired, do we lack imagination, or are the cultural
narratives so powerful that we can’t produce any other kind of narrative desires beyond
the ones so present in the culture at large? Theoretically the queer body expands gender
and destabilizes hetero/homo binaries, and certainly the rigidity of hegemonic gender
roles has been addressed since the advent of second wave feminism. But what constitutes
“queer or queered” gender roles needs just as much scrutiny.
There are so many questions about gender and queer porn floating around in my head,
and I have no clear organizing principle or theoretical framework from which to produce a
coherent fifteen minute “paper.” So I decided I’d try to answer a few of the questions for my-
self in no particular order, with no desire to be comprehensive, with no claim to expertise.
Is there a difference between queer porn and straight

porn? If the answer is yes, what is that difference?
The bodies are the biggest difference. Queer bodies, altered or not by surgery, hormones
or attitude, are different from heterosexually identified bodies. They are no more con-
structed as identities than are the majority of unchallenged male and female, masculine
and feminine bodies of the mainstream. But female masculinity, power relationships,
and transsexuality trouble the reading of these bodies in a way that destabilizes all gen-
dered bodies.
And yet content-wise, there’s really not much narrative difference. However, I’d say the
major difference in regard to content is intention — queer porn is definitely coded as “play”
so there’s no question as to whether it’s “real,” unlike violent straight/heterosexual porn that
often leaves the viewer either believing or seriously wondering whether if what they saw was
actually real: like rape scenarios and other forms of violence. Queer porn is unmistakably
“a scene,” clearly play, even when it mimics hetero-normative gender relationships.
Are you saying you actually

believe photographs and videos are real?
You can assume all photo and video is constructed as a fiction controlled by the person
holding the camera and the person who is editing, if editing is even involved. But with
certain kinds of straight porn it’s sometimes hard to believe it isn’t “real,” even if you
know it has to have been staged, because there is an attempt to show (or to realistically
simulate) actual violence. The real world analogue is just too close to elicit a response
of anything but horror — “Am I actually seeing someone being raped?” If it is an actual
rape as many sites proclaim (which is the point of it and the locus of the turn-on for the
audience), then it’s a criminal act and doesn’t even fit my definition of pornography.
(Sexually explicit imagery in which the consensual acts being depicted are intended
for the sexual arousal and masturbatory entertainment of the viewer. This definition ex-
cludes illegal acts such as images or videos that “document” children being sexualized or
molested, criminal rape and violent abuse, murder (snuff), etc., all being non-consensual
acts, but generally still included within the category of pornography. I consider these to
be prosecutable crimes, and therefore not technically pornography.)
Even when queer porn sets out to simulate violent scenes, even when the acts them-
selves are very similar to what might happen in straight porn, it is still unmistakably “a
scene” and thus very clearly fetishistic.
Isn’t that a double standard? Hypothetically, what if the

straight porn is no more “real” than the queer stuff. If it’s
all being acted, would you still feel there is a difference?
Pretty much. I’m not ready to give porn carte blanche across the board. There’s accept-
able and unacceptable porn. No matter how tolerant I’ve become of most genres of
porn including heterosexual porn aimed pretty exclusively at men, I still have to draw
a line at violence that’s intended to look real as opposed to violence that’s obviously
intended as fantasy both for the perpetrator and the “victim,” the dominant and the
submissive, the one with power and the one without. Violent heterosexual porn is rep-
licating something that isn’t a fantasy, something that isn’t consensual, something that
validates criminal violence, particularly against women. There is a distinction between
the two genres in regard to violence, subtle as it may be visually, heterosexual porn is
based in misogyny; queer porn in role and power play.
236 C’Lick Me
So the question becomes why would queer porn want to

engage in violent scenarios such as rape, cutting, or any in-
fliction of pain?
Because the fantasy of being at the mercy of a force beyond your control, of completely
relinquishing your own control, to be made to do something you might not otherwise
do, and on the flip side of it, to make someone totally submissive to you, is hot. I think
a lot of women have rape fantasies. We grow up with the fear and the fascination of it.
Queers aren’t immune to the influence of the dominant culture. Do they actually want
to be raped in the criminal sense? No. But when the fantasy is controlled and all parties
have consented to their roles, it’s really hot.
Porn isn’t politically correct, whether it’s hetero, homo or queer. We all have our fan-
tasies, our fetishes, our deep dark little secrets, our unspeakable turn-ons, and they are
all supposed to be kept out of sight. That’s what complicates this analysis. Queers aren’t
supposed to have the same fantasies as hets and if they do, those fantasies are certainly
not perceived to have the same origins. Oddly enough, on Ssspread, the closer the scene
came to hetero-normative role-play, the hotter the viewers thought it was. But I suspect
queer porn is assumed to be on higher moral ground by liberal segments of academia
simply because it’s queer and not heterosexual.
OK, so let’s step to the higher moral ground then. What is it

about queer porn that elevates it to a protected, intellec-
tual sphere?
Queer porn is a documentation of an important aspect of queer lives — it gives visibility
to queer bodies and their sexual practices, giving representation to a diverse if relatively
small “community” that has very little public presence, and even less representation
of its sexualities. Academically, queer porn is a magnifying glass in regard to the com-
plexities of gender and I believe it serves a very different purpose than the study of other
genres within the greater context of pornography as a historical and cultural phenom-
ena. Power dynamics are subverted, inverted and perverted in queer porn. The very
essence of who we think we are as gendered beings is called into question and unmerci-
fully interrogated.
A quote from an essay by Judith Shapiro in Body Guards: the cultural politics of gen-
der ambiguity (1991):
The way in which transsexuals go about establishing their gender in social interactions
reminds us that the basis on which we are assigned a gender in the first place (that is,
anatomical sex) is not what creates the reality of gender in ongoing social life. …Trans-
sexualism makes explicit for us the usually tacit processes of gender attribution. …the
transsexual reveals the extent to which the normally sexed person is a “contingent prac-
tical accomplishment.” In other words, they make us realize that we are all passing.
(257)
I credit the gender-queer and transgendered actors and members of Ssspread with an
education I couldn’t possibly have acquired otherwise. Making queer fantasy visible is a
challenge to dominant ideas about the fixity of gender, and because of that, it is a politi-
cal gesture not without consequences particularly in this ultra conservative climate.
Isn’t that assigning a little too much credibility to images

of people fucking made specifically to get people off?
I don’t know.
I’ll end with one last statement rather than another question I can’t answer. We can
forever analyze porn as having a social significance for the understanding of power, sex,
and gender, and as being a political and politicized cultural form of production. But what
it will always come down to, whether it’s gay, straight, dyke, queer or whatever, is that it
is produced as a tool for sexual stimulation, primarily masturbation. Porn is made to get
people off. In order to do this, bodies must not only be highly sexualized, but objecti-
fied, fetishized, exotified and made to accommodate very particular individual kinks. Po-
litical correctness has become an intellectual prison within which an extremely limited
dialogue can take place, and in fact where monologues and diatribes are usually the dis-
cursive practice. Embracing the need to objectify and be objectified, to fetishize and be
fetishized, to play the willing victim as well as the victimizer, opens up a mine field that
will be difficult to traverse, but it is a more intellectually provocative and honest terrain
from which to understand who we are as complex sexual beings. I applaud and thank
the organizers of this conference for creating the kind of environment in which we are
able to expand this conversation.
239
‘The Real Thing’:

Reframing Queer Pornography
for Virtual Spaces
Julie Levin Russo
The free tour of the CyberDyke network Cyber-dyke.net includes a promotional ban-
ner [Figure. 1] that captions thumbnail images of happy naked women with the phras-
es: “real fantasies / real orgasms / real lust / real butches / real bodies / real sex.” As
evidenced here, “real” is the primary term the site uses to frame its project, implying
that the realness on offer at CyberDyke is what distinguishes their product from “fake”
commercial lesbian porn. The immediate problem with this strategy, which is com-
mon to much alternative netporn (see www.altporn.net), is that “real” is just as much
a ubiquitous catchphrase of the very commercial porn from which CyberDyke and its
ilk want to set themselves apart. WeLiveTogether.com, for example, a porn site which
features three supposed roommates who pick up a different girl each week for a group
lesbian scene, also invites potential customers to “Find out how REAL lesbians live”
[Fig. 2]. Thus, if CyberDyke and WeLiveTogether offer the spectator palpably different
experiences — and to me it seems that they do — the status of this difference remains a
provocative question: Is it just that WeLiveTogether is lying about being real, whereas
CyberDyke is telling the truth? And if so, what precisely is it about CyberDyke that is
more real?
In addition to being a popular marketing buzzword, realness has been identified by
many theorists of porn as a defining characteristic of the genre. In order to schematically
condense this field, I’d like to propose that pornography is typically understood as having
a privileged relationship to the real in one or more of four ways:
• it records an unsimulated, authentic sexual act (realness of production)

• its images appear real due to their character and conventions (realness of representation)
240 C’Lick Me
• it acts directly on the viewer to produce real effects (realness of reception)

• it is directly tied to real economic, political, and/or cultural processes (realness of
social context)
As an especially apt and microcosmic example, CyberDyke mobilizes all four argu-
ments in their FAQ. Elaborating on the question I raised above, “So what’s the differ-
ence between ‘hot lesbian action’ for ‘frat boys’ and quality porn aimed at real women
and lesbians?” they answer:
We use real people and couples as often as possible, and narratives based on real-life
and real fantasies. We try to depict the sex the way people really have it, not just in po-
sitions that maximize expos[ure] to the camera or that make the women look a certain
way… That other kind of porn is easy to recognize: it has obvious cues, like a silly con-
trived plot-line or artificial-looking women; it’s not about the real world at all… Even
if the content is almost identical in terms of the action and explicitness, the personality
of the camera holder makes [a] big difference; he or she is a proxy for the viewer.
(my emphasis)
This statement relies on a realness of production in its claims that its models are “real
people and couples.” It invokes a realness of representation in its discussion of visu-
al strategies, like naturalistic staging and implied viewer positioning, that allow Cyber-
Dyke’s images to “depict the sex the way people really have it.” It references a realness of
reception in identifying CyberDyke in the query as “porn aimed at real women and les-
bians,” suggesting that it will effectively act in pleasurable ways on these authentic minds
and bodies. And elsewhere in the FAQ, it’s clear that CyberDyke is also concerned with
a contextual realness: they write that “we’re out to redeem porn!… women often don’t
have much extra pocket-change for things like porn sites, and… they are anxious about
signing up for adult sites as well. I thought a network of sites made by women, a safe
space on the Net where sex was given respect, was needed.” This is a project to inter-
vene, through porn, in the broader sociopolitical field of gendered sexuality.
Now, the fact that this four-fold conceptual tether, or some part of it, is taken up by
both alternative and mainstream porn sites, and (as I’ll discuss) by both pro- and anti-porn
critics, suggests, at the very least, that this convoluted historical, theoretical, and ideologi-
cal nexus of pornography and the real requires rigorous examination. For politically-en-
gaged queer netporn sites, the question of what assumptions they perpetuate when they
embrace this language is especially important. The idea that porn has a special capacity
to transparently reflect the real, one of the most common aspects of this discourse, is nec-
essarily problematic in its erasure of mediation. But it becomes increasingly untenable as
porn encounters first video and then the Internet, moving further and further from the
specifically visual and indexical particulars of its cinematic roots. If the celebration of
referentiality is in tension with the digital pixels of the net, it is equally antithetical to the
ideal project of queer porn, which is anything but reflecting an established, static “real”
Figure 1. From http://www.cyber-dyke.net/cyberdyke-tour1.html.
Figure 2. From http://www.iwantanewgirlfriend.com/porn/we-live-together.asp.

Figure 3. From http://welivetogether.com/main.htm.
Figure 4. From http://www.tlavideo.com/details/product_details.cfm?id=127413.

sexuality. After surveying the discourse of realness and its problems in more detail, I’d ul-
timately like to argue that CyberDyke is in fact more real than commercial lesbian porn,
but only in the last of my four modes (the contextual): it participates in a dynamic and
ongoing process of identity and community formation. This role, which we might more
appropriately call virtual, has the potential to reverberate fruitfully with the virtuality of
digital media to offer “alternative” porn alternative models of legitimacy.
As I’ve already suggested, the first reservation one might have about the promotion of
alternaporn’s signature realness is that much anti-porn rhetoric is founded on a parallel
argument. According to Catharine MacKinnon, the North American anti-porn feminist
movement’s chief figure, pornography is defined, first of all, as a record of real, pro-filmic
rape and abuse of women: “pictures women had to be directly used to make” (MacKin-
non 2000:98), sex that “is happening to their bodies” (106). MacKinnon is the number
one proponent of what I’ve called the realness of production — the idea that porn trans-
parently depicts real women having real sex. Second of all, she defines porn as the genre
with real effects (what I’ve called realness at the site of reception): “In a very real way,”
she writes, pornographic pictures “have made sex be what it is to the people who use you
and the pictures of you interchangeably… [Women’s] fathers, husbands, and doctors
saw the pictures, liked them, and did the same things to them” (95). Through the erec-
tions and orgasms it stimulates in the bodies of its viewers, masturbatory rituals that are
part of a real-time “sex act” (101), porn causes them to do what they’ve seen onscreen.
Moreover, porn is thus the linchpin of the patriarchal sex-gender system (the realness of
social context):
Pornography makes the world a pornographic place through its making and use, es-
tablishing what women are said to exist as, are seen as, are treated as, constructing the
social reality of what a woman is and can be in terms of what can be done to her, and
what a man is in terms of doing it (106).
As for porn’s realness of representation, MacKinnon acknowledges it, writing that “the
camera gives the pictures a special credibility, a deep verisimilitude, an even stronger
claim to truth” (95), but sees it as a damaging alibi: “[state] protection [of pornography]
relies centrally on putting it back into the context of the silence of violated women:
from real abuse back to an ‘idea’ or ‘viewpoint’ on women and sex… On the assumption
that words have only a referential relation to reality, pornography is defended as only
words” (98). For MacKinnon, pornography is not representation at all, but pure unme-
diated reality.
Because MacKinnon so definitively staked out porn’s privileged relation to the real
as a reason to despise and censor it, pro-porn feminists have traditionally responded by
taking the opposite tack, emphasizing the nontransparent, nonlinear aspects of represen-
tation and desire. As Judith Butler puts it, “Whereas anti-pornography feminists presume
a mimetic relation between the real, fantasy, and representation that presumes the prior-
ity of the real, we [other feminists] can understand the ‘real’ as a variable construction
244 C’Lick Me
which is always and only determined in relation to its constitutive outside: fantasy, the
unthinkable, the unreal” (Butler, 2000: 488). Jane Gaines believes that this schism rever-
berated through film and media theory more generally, confirming that, because of the
behaviorist terms of popular media and anti-pornography discourses, theorists were long
reluctant to speculate that texts can have direct, material effects. This terrain shifted, she
claims, with the penetration of Foucault into feminist film theory, particularly in Linda
Williams’ seminal book Hard Core. Situating pornography as the founding principle of
cinema itself, Williams writes that the cinematic apparatus would “produce a new kind
of body, which viewers experience through this optical machine” (Williams, 1999:45).
Thus, according to Gaines, Williams is the first left-wing feminist to venture into the
discursive territory staked out by Catharine MacKinnon: “Here it is. The bold feminist
admission of what anti-porn groups have feared the most: machines making the body do
all manner of perverse things” (32). According to Gaines, at least, feminists on the left
can now agree with feminists on the right that pornography acts on and shapes the body
of the spectator, though the potential political consequences of this convergence are not
yet clear. Feminist and queer pornographers are echoing both camps when, based on the
assumption that viewers act out what they see in porn in their own bodies, they call for
porn that shows more “real sex.”
Williams’ book, however, is most concerned with what I’ve called the realness of
representation: she argues that film as a medium is inextricable from the pornographic
pleasure of its attempts to capture the visual real, and conversely, that the incontrovert-
ible impression of realness characteristic of sexually explicit images authenticates all
film. Discussing early protocinema, particularly Muybridge’s motion studies, Williams
notes that “it is but a short leap from the ‘academic question’ of body movement me-
chanics to the ‘pornographic answer,’ wherein the elusive and prurient ‘truth’ is located
in increasingly more detailed investigations of the bodies of women” (36). At the origin
of film, then, “positivist” anatomical and sexual knowledge is yoked to the “maximum
visibility” of sex.
Now, I don’t think we should accept that all pornography is necessarily defined by this
sort of claim to cinematic realism, particularly as porn transitions to video in the 1980s
and now to digital media. Paul Willemen quotes Laurence O’Toole’s assertion that “by
the 1990s [porn] had changed from ‘…being about “real” people having hot sex to body-
sculpted, silicone-enhanced superhumans “performing” hot sex,’” and goes on to main-
tain that “[w]hat such films achieve… is the new genre of the ‘performed documentary’
[à la reality TV], whereas the older forms of pornography were more straightforwardly
in the ‘cinema direct’ idiom or in the mainstream, ‘realist,’ ‘classical narrative’ idiom”
(Willemen, 2004: 20). In response to the increasing dominance of porn’s artificial, spec-
tacular mode over the cinematic realism that Williams emphasizes, an opposing strategy
of authentication has developed, drawing heavily on video and television. I’d date this to
the markedly self-reflexive 1989 porno The Adventures of Buttman, which launched the
now wildly popular gonzo genre. While certainly still animated by a will to knowledge
focused on the involuntary confession of sexual pleasure, amateur porn eschews formulas
and staging in favor of low production values that convey what, in television studies, is
described as “liveness”: a sense of presence, immediacy, and spontaneity. As Zabet Pat-
terson puts it, “the central draw of the amateur image [is] that it shows ‘real bodies’ expe-
riencing ‘real pleasure.’ This desire is figured oppositionally to the supposed artificiality
of more general pornography, in which ‘it’s all fake’” (Patterson, 2004: 116). The second
reservation I’d raise about the discourse of realness, then, is the question of whether the
voyeuristic, scientific impulse to expose the sexual real retains its explanatory rigor when
applied to nonindexical media, or whether amateur video and netporn is in fact making
a far more simulacral appeal.
Internet media such as Webcams have eagerly embraced this postmodern (as op-
posed to cinema’s modern) mode, capitalizing on an impression of temporal and spatial
presentness familiar from television. As Patterson puts it, “the necessarily low-res quality
of the streaming video thus becomes a further guarantee of liveness… a sense of presence
guaranteed by what is perceived as a privileged relationship to the real” (113). Wendy
Chun also focuses her analysis on amateur netporn, which is saturated with these strate-
gies. Discussing the artporn site IsabellaCam, which invites those of you who’ve “‘had
enough with corporate porn and fake orgasms [to] come here and open your mind 2 the
ultimate in virtual sexual experiences where everything u see is 100% REAL,’” Chun
argues that such
‘Amateur’ webcam sites… mimic voyeurism in order to create indexicality and authen-
ticity within a seemingly nonindexical medium… ‘voyeuristic’ images lend the Inter-
net an authenticity it otherwise does not have… further buttressing the ‘reality effect’
necessary to making fiber-optic communications and computer-generated images seem
transparent. (Chun, 2006:103)
A similar strategy of simulated liveness is evident at WeLiveTogether.com [fig. 3], where

pornographic installments are framed by introductory scenes and brief diary-like texts
that narrate how the “roommates” met their conquest of the week in the course of their
daily activities. Chun’s crucial point is that netporn is doing a certain ideological work
for the Internet as a whole, importing the cinematic sense of referentiality that Williams
identifies as porn’s legacy into a medium with which it is no longer commensurate. This
is another reason to beware of online claims for images’ authenticity.
Despite these medium-specific changes in its conventions, however, mainstream por-
nography universally retains what is, according to Williams, the key conventionalized
marker of realism as “maximum visibility”: the money shot. Williams sees the money
shot — an interruption of the all-important genital connection and a shift of focus from
the female to the male body — as a fetish substitute for the invisible, involuntary truth
of female sexual pleasure that porn always seeks but can never capture. Analyzing it
as both a Freudian and Marxian fetish, Williams writes that “[i]n combining money
and sexual pleasure — those simultaneously valuable and dirty things — the money shot
most perfectly embodies the profound alienation of contemporary consumer society”
246 C’Lick Me
(107), a society in which even human bodies are commodified. This points toward what
I’ve called pornography’s privileged connection to the contextual real. Williams cites
porn historian Walter Kendrick, who “maintains boldly that pornography as we know it
emerges at that moment when the diffusion of new kinds of mass media… exacerbates a
dominant group’s worry about the availability of these media to persons less ‘responsible’
than themselves” (12). Jennifer Wicke elaborates on this connection, claiming that “[a]t
the bottom of the so-called pornography debate lies a mystified relation to the condi-
tions of mass culture… To many commentators, the ease and rapidity of mass cultural
consumptive visual strategies is appallingly emblematized by pornography itself, where
the languor and voluptuousness of consumption in general gets raised to its apotheosis”
(Wicke, 2004:179). Pornography becomes a sort of screen onto which the anxieties and
evils of capitalist modernity can be projected. Hence, it also becomes a cathected site of
social regulation and control — the attempt to censor obscenity, Carolyn Dean asserts,
“represents an effort to ward off threats to the concept of stable sexuality first defined in
the interwar years and embedded in normative heterosexual expression” (Dean, 1996:
70). Given this social terrain, we must be wary, in a third sense, of the impulse to reject
the purported artificiality and objectification of pornography with calls for porn that is
more real and authentic: this rhetorical move adopts the terms of anti-porn anxieties, and
disavows the fact that pornography’s perceived connection to the real is often precisely
what makes it seem emblematic of the evils of commodity capitalism — just as the money
shot is the quintessential marker of both spontaneous and involuntary sexual confession
and conventionalized, manufactured pornographic spectacle.
If all this is at stake when it comes to mainstream commercial pornography, I’d now
like to ask how it’s materialized specifically for queer porn. Certainly — since, as Wil-
liams, Dean, and Chun have argued, attempts to contain pornography are symptoms of
the defense of normative sexuality — queer porn has always been especially vulnerable
to prosecution and persecution based on arguments from the contextual real. In her ar-
ticle “Second Thoughts on Hard Core,” Williams traces “a major change taking place
in American obscenity law… away from the notion of explicit sex and towards the tar-
geting of scapegoatable ‘deviants’” (Williams, 2004:166), particularly homosexuals and
sadomasochists. The aspiration to produce, say, lesbian porn that reflects (or perhaps
produces) an authentic lesbian experience — whether through unmediated access to the
real sex happening in front of the camera, through the viewer’s real bodily response, or
through representational codes that evoke this impression of the real — must operate in
this highly-charged milieu. In her history of “dyke porn,” Heather Butler quotes the box
cover of the early amateur series San Francisco Lesbians: “True dykes right off the street!
They’re incredible and they’re real!” [fig. 4]. Some porno films, she writes, “attempt to
suggest an authentic dyke space outside of the diegesis” (Butler, 2004:187) by “co-opt-
ing an already established dyke community” that is recognizable to the target audience
(186). When the regulation of pornography becomes a means of defining and policing
sexual subcultures, the production of pornography becomes an important means of self-
defining identity and community. This is the most significant sense in which “real” queer
Figure 5. From http://www.cyber-dyke.net/public/gallery/albums.php.
Figure 6.
porn is a valuable and politically vital project: rather than allowing the anti-porn forces
to monopolize the interpretation of the real of sexuality and “deviance,” queer porn stra-
tegically reclaims the label “real” for images that are connected in their production and
consumption to material social networks and collective experiences.
However, the three reservations I raised earlier still hold, and they amount to the
same thing: there’s always an ideological erasure in play when images are described as
unmediated. This is the most disturbing aspect of anti-porn feminist rhetoric, first of all,
and the impulse to adopt it wholesale should give us pause; secondly, it plays into the
symptomatic urge to rollback the fetishistic artificiality of capitalism to a pure, uncon-
taminated contact; and finally, it is particularly disingenuous when it claims transparency
for the Internet, a nonindexical, nonvisual medium. Overall, Heather Butler claims that
dyke porn is characterized by “the attempt to create a fantasy of authenticity” (189), and
it is important to remember that this desire remains a phantasmatic one. Seeing authen-
ticity in the images is always relies on a process of reading: for all we know, the models
on WeLiveTogether.com are “really” lesbians and bisexual women — what makes Cyber-
Dyke more real is not the innate sexuality of its producers (to which we have no reliable
access) but their mobilization of recognizable markers of dyke subculture (e.g. butch
bodies, tattoos and piercings, fetish attire). And this is certainly not a real which all queer
women will necessarily accept or identify with. If CyberDyke is about “real women’s real
fantasies,” then, this is a strategic real that is meant to participate in the protean dynamics
of community and identity building, not a pre-given real that appears transparently in the
image. As Judith Butler writes, “when we point to something as real, and in political dis-
course it is very often imperative to wield the ontological indicator in precisely that way,
this is not the end but the beginning of the political problematic… If the production of
the real takes place through a restriction of the phantasmatic… then the phantasmatic
emerges necessarily as the variable boundary from which the real is insistently contested”
(489). The real, that is, is never pure — it is constitutively contaminated by the phantas-
matic, much as mass culture is constitutively contaminated by the pornographic.
Furthering my assertion that CyberDyke’s claim to realness is more strategic than
hegemonic is the fact that the site is unconcerned with either documentary or televisual
modes of authentication as previously discussed. Instead, it adopts the conventions of
erotic art, such as aesthetisized composition, evocative staging, and fanciful narratives
[fig. 5]. CyberDyke states, in the FAQ, “We want to let erotica and porn consumers
know that porn doesn’t have to be contrived or ugly or insulting to one’s intelligence;
that explicit work can be beautiful and thought provoking. We want to make adult enter-
tainment that is authentic, spontaneous, and that has artistic merit.” It is, in this sense,
appealing specifically to the real as entangled with the phantasmatic — what they rather
paradoxically call “real fantasies.” Again, to quote Judith Butler:
The categories of identity instate or bring into ‘the real’ the very phenomenon that they
claim to name only after the fact… The task is not to resolve or restrain the tension, the
crisis, the phantasmatic excess induced by the term, but to affirm identity categories as
250 C’Lick Me
a site of inevitable rifting… It is the incommensurability of the phantasmatic and the

real that requires at this political juncture to be safeguarded. (504)
We might say, following Butler, that it is through the instability of the “real” as Cyber-
Dyke mobilizes it, through the invested choices that appear in the course of naming
what counts as a legitimate representation of real lesbians, that the site does its most
crucial political work (rather than, as they seem to claim, through relaying a pre-existing
“real” experience).
If Williams intimately links the origins of cinematic pornography with modernity,
netporn — with its post-industrial economics of personalized taxonomies and disposable
bodies, its sometimes televisual modes of authentication and its post-structuralist theo-
retical ties — can fittingly be associated with postmodernity. The Internet, in its techno-
logical specificity, offers opportunities to take alternative pornography in the direction of
proliferating rather than stabilizing “reals.” As a nonvisual medium (something which
Chun argues that netporn’s amateur authenticity is often trying to efface), the Internet
potentially frees porn from the cinematic expectation of transparency, opening the door
to more fanciful conceptions of the route from the eye of the photographer to the eye of
the spectator. With its much-touted virtuality, the Internet calls into question the bound-
aries of the real, which may no longer appear as a set of contiguous physical spaces where,
say, unsimulated sex happens in front of a camera and a viewer masturbates elsewhere in
front of a screen — these sites may instead appear as nodes in a part-physical, part-imma-
terial, part-phantasmatic webwork of economic and subjective transactions. And perhaps
most importantly, the Internet, as a distributed network, can facilitate changed relations
between the producers and the consumers of pornography, wherein porn can be a partici-
patory form of intercourse within subcultural communities that are composed equally of
real and virtual environments. I’d argue that all these possibilities are nascent in the work
of the CyberDyke network. To close with the words of Zabet Patterson:
The affective charge of pornography is linked to, and redoubled by, the affective charge
attached to new and perpetually renewed computer technology. Pornography changes
once it is positioned on the computer; the attraction of cyberporn becomes in part the
attraction to and fascination with what we perceive as the vastly new possibilities for
subjectivity that technology seems to offer. (120)
Queer netporn needs to take up the challenge of capitalizing on the pleasures and po-
tential of its medium by cultivating discourses of purpose and legitimacy that don’t fall
back on the specter of a static, overdetermined “real.”
References
Butler, H. (2004) “‘What Do You Call a Lesbian with Long Fingers’: The Development
of Lesbian and Dyke Pornography” in Porn Studies, ed. L. Williams, Durham/London,
Duke University Press.
Butler, J. (2000) “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Ex-
cess” in Feminism and Pornography. ed. D. Cornell, Oxford/New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Chun, W.H.K. (2006) Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Op-
tics. MIT Press.
“CyberDyke FAQ.” <http://www.cyber-dyke.net/faq.html>, 30 April 2007.
Dean, C. J. (1996) “Sexuality, Obscenity Law, and Violence in the United States: 1950-
1994.” Sexuality and Modern Western Culture. New York: Twayne Publishers.
Gaines, J. (2004) “Machines that Make the Body Do Things” in More Dirty Looks: Gen-
der, Pornography and Power, 2nd edn., ed. P. C. Gibson. London: British Film Institute.
MacKinnon, C. (2000) “Only Words” (excerpt from Only Words) in Feminism and Por-
nography, D. Cornell, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press.
Patterson, Z. (2004) “Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era” in

Porn Studies, ed. L. Williams, Durham/London, Duke University Press.
Willemen, P. (2004) “For a Pornoscape.” More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and
Power, 2nd edn., P. C. Gibson, London, British Film Institute.
Williams, L. (1999) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,2nd edn,
Berkeley/Los Angeles, University of California Press.
------. “Second Thoughts on Hard Core: American Obscenity Law and the Scapegoating
of Deviance” in More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, 2nd edn., ed. P. C.
Gibson. London: British Film Institute, 2004.
Wicke, J. (2004) “Through a Gaze Darkly: Pornography’s Academic Market.” More

Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, 2nd edn., ed. P. C. Gibson. London: Brit-
ish Film Institute.
253
First Porn Son:

Asian-man.com and the Golden Porn Revolution
Samantha Culp
Rick Lee has sex with girls on camera. A lot of girls. How many exactly? He’s lost count
somewhere north of five-hundred-and-fifty, but intends to start tallying again. He runs a
pay web-site featuring explicit videos of his sexual adventures, updated weekly to satisfy
his fans. None of the above is unusual in the wild wild west of Southern California, the
capital of the nation’s booming adult entertainment industry, where thousands of men
and women are plugging away (and in every conceivable way) to turn pleasure into prof-
it. Like them, Rick is in it for the fun and the money, but also for the cause: to show, in
his own words, “that Asian men have a penis.”
There are no Asian-American men in heterosexual porn. Gay porn, yes — a
quick search on the Internet or spin around your local sex shop will turn up Best of
Geisha Boys Vol. 9 and Dragon Fucker, as well as the “Samurai” penis enlarger sex toy
(“Give your cock the strength of a warrior”), all featuring smooth-skinned Asian pretty-
boys peering demurely from the packaging. But most of this content is produced in Asia
itself (Thailand or the Philippines mostly), and is still a small niche market compared
to the enormous demand for Asian females in straight porn. From Asia Carrera to Anna-
bel Chong, Bamboo Bimbos to Porcelain China Vagina, Japanese schoolgirls to “Saigon
Whores,” the adult world is hyper-saturated with images of the sexy and submissive Asian
female, custom-tailored to the fetishes of their primarily white male consumers. And
the “Little China Dolls” and “Oriental Blossoms,” not to mention their “Blonde Cheer-
leader” or “Hot Chocolate” or “Tijuana Spice” sisters, are always shown with big strong
white guys, or sometimes African-American guys, maybe even Latinos… but never with
Asian-American dudes. Until now.
254 C’Lick Me
Welcome to the only Adult site on the Internet that focuses on Asian men and women
of all kinds, including blonde girls, brunettes, Latinas, Asian, Black girls, etc. I am a
horny guy and I want to be with all the beautiful girls out there!
(www.asian-man.com)
“I mean, I’ve seen an Asian guy doing straight porn, but it’s rare, very rare,” Rick Lee
ruminates over a café latte at a West Hollywood Starbucks. He is explaining how he got
into porn, and how his website, Asian-man.com, got started. It’s a bit of a shock to meet
the man in person after witnessing his orgasms online, and to see his face, after only
seeing the rest of him. Rick always digitally blurs his identity in the pictures and videos
to separate the life of Asian-man from that of Clark Kent. On the site he explains: “in
time I might actually put a regular picture of myself, to let everyone see me…until then,
imagine a good ol’ Azn boy with a big smile on his face.” Which is a pretty accurate de-
scription. He’s an ordinary-looking guy with a broad smile, glossy black hair, a casual
confidence but also an extremely polite manner. The first true Asian-American male
porn star challenges the stereotypes in more ways than one. One of his fans proclaims
on a message board: “Based on preconceived notions, I’d think that Rick was a coke-
snorting misogynist; fortunately, he’s everything else but that.”
Ethnically Chinese, but born in South America, Rick Lee (not a real name, but nei-
ther is Jenna Jameson) came to the States at age twenty-one and has been here ever since.
He speaks impeccable English with just a trace of a Spanish accent; he has an MBA,
and held a normal white-collar office job for several years before becoming a free-lance
webmaster. He’s intensely private about his family and the non-porn women he dates.
He doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. He just loves the ladies. “I’ve just been very sexual
most of my life, and when I got onto the Internet I got into the swinging thing, exploring
sex. And then one thing leads to another…” One day while assisting the camera-crew on
an adult film being produced by a friend, they needed an extra guy for a sex scene. The
producer friend said, “if you want to jump in, just go ahead.” Rick jumped.
Not long after, he started Asian-man.com, first as a “hobby,” just a web-journal to
document his busy sex-life and to post what pictures he could find of other Asian men
doing the deed with hot ladies. Which weren’t very many. Rick originally hoped to have
several “AM” (Asian male) performers on the site, but couldn’t find anyone else who fit
the description and wanted to participate. “So I figured I’d just do it myself and com-
bine the site with my then-online sex journal.” In the beginning he wasn’t even charging
membership fees; he had a “day-job” and didn’t need the money. But then the site’s traf-
fic began using up bandwidth, and the girly galleries multiplied, and the fans clamored
for more. Asian-man.com then became a pay-site with more extensive triple-x content,
as well as stories, dating advice, forums, submissions, and links. Though the member-
ship is still small (around 200), Rick knew he had stumbled onto something important.
“I got feedback from the guys who really wanted this, and I realized that it went deeper
than porn. They felt they were misrepresented or oppressed, and it made me think about
a lot of things. This is a real issue, that a lot of Asian-American men face… that we’re
not that sexually represented, you know, in the media.” Some might call that a major
understatement.
Jackie Chan and Jet Li are great at kicking ass and the Dali Lama is good at putting
his face on MTV and all over the world for his peace movement, but when was the last
time you saw an Asian guy with a hot woman on television or a movie?? When was the
last time you saw an Asian man having sex on screen??
(www.asian-man.com)
The absence of studly Asian men in porn is perfectly paralleled by their absence in main-
stream American popular culture as well. Even a cursory glance at the American media
will reveal the stereotypes about Asian and Asian-American men to which Rick Lee and
countless others refer: effeminate villain, pathetic pervert, clownish nerd, or simply invis-
ible. These overlap and have changed slightly over time, but the asexual essence of these
images persists even today. The swishy and evil Fu Manchu, the inscrutable Charlie
Chan, and the comical voyeur Mr. Yunioshi of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (all played by white
actors in “yellowface”) gave way in the 1980s to Long Duk Dong (Sixteen Candles) and
the sadistic businessmen of Rising Sun, and eventually to imported kung-fu masters, who
chew up a lot of scenery but never get the girl, like Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
On the other hand, Asian and Asian-American women in television and the movies
are Dragon Ladies or Suzie Wongs, and, just like their triple-X counterparts, are always
paired with white guys. This discrepancy carries over to the real world as well: accord-
ing to the 2000 census, Asian-American women married white or non-Asian spouses
3.08 times more often than Asian-American men did. In his memoir Where the Body
Meets Memory, poet David Mura quotes the Japanese-American actor Marc Hayashi:
“Every culture needs its eunuchs. And we’re it. Asian-American men are the eunuchs
of America.”
Artists, academics and cultural critics have been aware of this issue for quite some
time, but writers and scholars like David Mura, Shawn Wong, and Amy Kashiwabara
have focused more on identifying the problem, exploring its reasons, and airing personal
grievances, instead of finding a way to change things. Professor Darrell Y. Hamamoto of
UC Davis, however, refuses to stop there, and chastises his colleagues for doing so. “The
problem is — what do we do about it? To me, [identifying the stereotype] is not enough,
any halfway bright person can come up with these generalizations… I’m talking about a
revolution in consciousness.” Which brings us to Skin on Skin.
As long as Asian Americans are marginalized within, or excluded outright from, the
dominant system of film representation, they will continue to embody an alienated
sexuality conditioned by an oppressive system of White racial supremacy. …The most
efficacious and crudely direct strategy to assert an immediate visual presence is to take
up the camera and turn it inward to capture the pleasures of the flesh as enjoyed by
Yellow people…
256 C’Lick Me
So begins Dr. Hamamoto’s 1998 academic paper “The Joy Fuck Club: Prolegom-
enon to an Asian American Porno Practice,” where he lays out a game-plan for revolution-
izing representations of Asian-American (or more generally, “Yellow”) sexuality through
pornography. And earlier this year, the professor put his money where his mouth was,
and produced a fifty minute pornographic video starring an Asian-American man and
woman. The video is called Skin on Skin, and is already causing quite a stir. Hamamoto
wouldn’t have it any other way. “This is partly my act of revenge on academia,” the pro-
fessor says. “It’s sort of like a middle finger to my colleagues, and I’m just raising the bar
so high they’re gonna piss their pants…because I’m showing fucking on screen and they
just want to weasel around it with these weasel words.”
Professor Hamamoto has spent much of his academic career pushing peoples’ but-
tons, and clearly delights in it. He takes pride in being the first scholar to cite tabloids
such as the Star and National Enquirer as authoritative sources in his research, he uses
slang like “haters” and “to pop a chubby,” he calls Ang Lee a “coolie-man” and refers to
Paris Hilton as “that slutty girl.” He’s extremely frustrated with the stagnation, hypocrisy
and plagiarism in the academic world around him, and has a remarkably long hit list,
including many of his own Asian-American studies colleagues. “I don’t care, I’m going
to name names… it’s like a Hong Kong martial arts film: I’m up for revenge before I go
up the mountain to rejoin the Wushu masters.” He talks a mile a minute, and after three
hours, that’s a lot of ground covered. Somewhere between the psychomythology of se-
rial killings and the Wu-Tang Clan, we get to the story behind “The Joy Fuck Club” and
Skin on Skin.
In a class Hamamoto was teaching on “Theoretical Perspectives in Asian American
Studies,” he asked his (primarily Asian-American) students to discuss the types of bodies
they found sexually attractive, and found, to no one’s surprise, that all the bodies were
white. “That’s just more evidence to show how powerful the white supremacist complex is
in the lives of people of color,” Hamamoto says, “and that’s why I’m making these movies
for my people — to ask ‘why do you adore whiteness so much, why do you have Yankee
fever?’” He pauses to assert that he knows why, that there are “historical reasons for it,
material reasons, internment, genocide, exclusion, and if you’re subjected to all of these
historical forces, there’s a tendency to blend in, to assimilate, to love the master.” And
that besides these forces, white bodies are the only desirable ones portrayed in the main-
stream media today. No wonder Hamamoto’s students had a “warped” sense of their own
sexuality. “Man, you need some sexual healing,” the professor intones like a late-night
radio disk-jockey, “you need to get with some of the skin-on-skin action.” After writing up
these conclusions in “The Joy Fuck Club,” Hamamoto set about bringing images of yel-
low-on-yellow pleasure to the masses in the most direct way possible: porn.
Did he ever consider starring in the film himself? “Yeah, I did actually, sure, it plays
on my exhibitionist side… but my girlfriend has forbidden me from doing that.” Instead,
Hamamoto and his girlfriend and co-producer Funie Hsu started casting. The woman
was easy. Lyla Lei, a twenty-year-old half-Cambodian half-Thai girl with over sixty adult
videos already under her belt, agreed to take part in the project; but locating her costar
was more challenging. Professor Hamamoto first thought of Rick Lee, the original Asian-
man, whom he admires and even invited to speak to his students at UC Davis. “Rick Lee
is a good guy, he’s very very smart… He doesn’t have a political agenda, he just likes to
screw. I call him Rick the Dick. I wanted him to be in my movie, but I’m not gonna
have a film about Asian-American sexuality with a mask on.” Because Rick wouldn’t go
un-pixelated, an alternate had to be found. Rick recalls: “He wanted me to perform in it,
but I told him I can’t without a blur, I want to keep certain things private, so I told him I
could advise him on talent… But it was kind of difficult to find guys for them.” Many men
contacted Hamamoto only to bail out at the last moment. Finally, Hamamoto and Hsu
discovered Chun, a Korean-American adoptee from New Jersey who agreed to show his
face on camera. Chun flew in, the STD tests were taken, a hotel room in Torrance was
reserved, the stars began making out on the couch and then… “I was wondering what it
would be like when they were there and they were doing it. I wasn’t slightly aroused by
what was happening in front of me, I was just trying to figure out what the next sequence
was, making sure he that he didn’t blow his load too quickly.”
Hamamoto and Hsu did all the camera-work, shooting about three hours of footage
on mini-DV cameras. “It’s like the World Series,” the professor says, “you’re like a tenth
player, standing on the sidelines of the game, you could almost join in if you wanted to,
but you don’t want to.” Luckily, Chun hit a home-run, and Hamamoto ruminates like
a proud coach: “Does he have the makings of a porn star…” And he has all the more
chances to become one: not only do Chun and Lyla star in Skin on Skin, the fifty-minute
“wanker” movie, but they are also primary characters in the documentary Masters of the
Pillow, about the making of Hamamoto’s project and issues of Asian-American sexuality.
Director James Hou was a student of Hamamoto’s at UC Davis right as he was de-
veloping the “Joy Fuck Club” concept, back when “it was sort of a crazy idea that no
one could take seriously.” He went on to make a few short films, and was looking to do
a longer project that addressed issues of sexuality and masculinity when he heard about
Skin on Skin. Hou worked alongside Hamamoto, documenting the development process
and the actual shoot, as well as interviewing several “leading voices” of Asian-American
masculinity in arts and media, such as fellow filmmakers Eric Byler (charlotte sometimes)
and Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow), actor Eddie Shin (Gilmore Girls, That ‘80s Show),
Tony-award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly), and, of course, our
old friend Rick Lee. Everyone weighs in with their views on Hamamoto’s mission and
Asian male sexuality, and most agree that creating a new image — several kinds of new
images — is key. Hou says that “positive images are empowering images… not to say we
should all become porn stars, but we should embrace our sexuality.”
So far, Masters of the Pillow and excerpts from Skin on Skin (and its shorter, more
political companion piece, Yellocaust) have screened at the Hawaii International Film
Festival and the San Diego Asian-American Film Festival, mainly to rave response. At the
showing of Yellocaust in San Diego, Hamamoto recalls there was “almost universal sup-
port… the only two dissenters were two Asian-American female filmmakers, or wannabe
258 C’Lick Me
filmmakers, who said ‘well, the guy’s technique was passive, he wasn’t really aggressive,
he wasn’t dominating the woman.’ And someone in the audience said, ‘Just because it’s
Asian-American porn doesn’t mean you have to fall into the conventions of mainstream
white porn.” Hamamoto likes to point out that all the questions at these film festivals
were directed at him, and is glad that the message of Skin on Skin shines through James
Hou’s documentary. He admits that he’s surprised Masters of the Pillow is as good as it
is: “I thought he was gonna make it more of a comedy, more of a joke — sex is a very
funny topic, but this is no joke to me, it’s about our survival.” Both the Tonight Show
with Jay Leno and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart have run segments on Hamamoto’s
project, treating it with humor, but he doesn’t mind as long as it generates buzz. After
all, Hamamoto’s eventual ambition is to sell Skin on Skin to the highest bidder, and use
the money as start-up capital for an independent Asian media company: YEN (Yellow
Entertainment Network). There is plenty of interest already, but Hamamoto is “proceed-
ing very carefully.” “I don’t want to end up on the outside looking in… pioneers aren’t
always the ones who are the financial beneficiaries. But if nothing else, I have the dis-
tinction of being the first.”

Name: Amber Rain. Age: 23. Location: Los Angeles, California. Her Asian Experi-
ences: She had a boyfriend in high school who was Asian, but they never had sex. So
again I had to do my job and break her into a new world — :)
Even though Rick Lee is making a profit off of Asian-man.com these days, if he lost
money on it he wouldn’t mind. It grosses about $3000 a month, and isn’t his main source
of income. Some copy-cat web-sites have sprung up, including Bordello4am.com and
Pinkcrave.com, which offer content stolen from Japanese videos (according to Rick).
“This guy — he’s made it this commercial thing. I don’t think it does well, he wants to
make money on it…I think he came in with the wrong idea.” Rick’s idea was simple.
Have sex with beautiful ladies, record it for posterity, and maybe remind people that
“Asian men exist and that they do have sex and do enjoy it” (in the words of one mem-
ber). Rick Lee intends to retire in a few years, settle down and have a normal family, but
he has already made his mark.
In the 1980s, David Mura wrote about the frustration of watching porn: “I know
there is something missing, that I will never find my body, my Asian body, up there on
the screen, and this rage erases all other considerations, consumes me.” Slowly, this is
changing.
“Rick Lee is doing more for Asian-American men and women than any theoretician
out there,” proclaims Darrell Hamamoto. “Change only comes about through anarchy,
rupture, when you start renegotiating power relations. We’ll put an Asian-American lead
in a Hollywood film, I think that’s gonna happen soon, and I think a sea change is taking
place, and partly it will be due to me.”
Will the increased presence of Asian-American men in porn lead to greater and more
diverse representations in the mainstream media? Certain movies on studios’ slates for
spring release look promising for featuring studly Asian-American men: Leonardo Nam
in The Perfect Score, Daniel Dae Kim in Spiderman 2, and Byron Mann opposite Halle
Berry in Catwoman. But will they still just be playing emasculated best friends, kung fu
punching dummies, geeks, villains, clowns? Maybe we can’t rely on Hollywood just yet.
Professor Hamamoto argues that sexuality is “too important to belong to them [the pow-
ers that be]. They’re the most guilty of wringing the life out of human sexuality… let’s
take it from there, and change it, and revolutionize the personal and then the political
and then the World — that’s how powerful it is to human civilization.”
Meanwhile, somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, Rick Lee is getting ready to
shoot some more scenes. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
261
21st Century Schizoid Bear:

Masculine Transitions Through Net Pornography
Francesco Macarone Palmieri aka Warbear
The vector that transforms ideas into words is produced by the desire to understand
how masculinities are performed as gender representations in late postmodern netpor-
nographic languages. Such a hypothesis runs through a socio-anthropological analysis
of the end of gay culture and Bear culture therein, the return of the subversive body and
the political perspective of contemporary pornography. This theoretical horizon contex-
tualises the definition of new masculinities through four fields of netporn research:
1) LAMP dynamic Bear websites and self-representation of masculinity through the

concept of the profile as measure unit.
2) Ethnic fetishisation as re-appropriation of masculinity: the arabear phenomenon.
3) Bull Empire and morphing hyper-masculinisation as a post-Bear experience.
4) Transbears, masculinities through bodies and the evolution of FTM
transgendered culture.
Stealing and morphing the title of the famous King Crimson track, I operate some se-
mantic substitutions: schizophrenia is seen as a dense texture with which to signify re-
cent concepts of culture in the history of contemporary anthropology. Looking at the
sociological research field of cultural processes, we participate in the historical change
of the sociological concept of culture through an increasingly rapid disjunction and
liberation of the idea of the cultural form from the idea of society. Culture is no longer
enslaved by the structural-functionalist ideas of western society’s homeostatic balance
(of mostly European social democratic welfare societies). The social norms that render
social action through a precise value scale as the function of culture for the definition
262 C’Lick Me
of institutions collapsed as more of this scale has been designated and changed in terms
of individualisation. After the collapse of contemporary historic walls, postmodernism
bolstered this disjunctive process through producing a citizenship of alterity and a micro
economy of social aggregation with a sub-counter institutionalisation process. This was
the electricity that enlightened and energised all human and social rights movements
through to the end of the 20th century. This was a perfect sociological barometer of the
individualisation of cultures, which produced social trauma through the positive spread-
ing of anomia, etiologically defined as A-nomos; an absence of norms. This absence was
a subtraction of the idea of coherence imposed by the Hegelian philosophical idea of
dialectics towards the possibility of dialogic thought and action. Dialogic thought as an
architecture of postmodernism does not base itself on a synthesis of the contradictory
oppositions (thesis/antithesis), but on the maintenance of contradiction as the perfor-
mative actualisation of human complexity. Human complexity becomes post-modern
when it becomes a conscious, influential product of Appaduraian interscape connec-
tions. We can now say that coherence is to contemporary history what consistence is
to postmodernism. Again, etiologically speaking, consistence comes from “cum-sister”
to “being with.” This “being with” allows us to live the “subtraction” of synthesis as an
“addiction” of the antithesis. This means that the multiplication of identities creates
liberated spaces of representation and experimentation in terms of be/coming. Passing
from the concept of cultural schizophrenia as a re-appropriative value, to the one of
“Bear” can sound very far-fetched, but they are juxtaposed nonetheless. If the begin-
ning of the G/L/B/T community is a “total social fact” which represents postmodernism
as an alteration of instances of citizenship toward a disjunction from social mores, the
Bear community as a subcultural definition of sexual orientation, mathematics and gen-
der representations expresses its acceleration towards cultural explosion. The frontiers
opened by the post-modern age are being reshaped by new boundaries that are histori-
cising life cycles of present experiences.
As television images of the fall of the Berlin wall produced a ritualised narrative that
sanctioned the beginning of a “Post-era”; while 9/11 closed it with the fall of the Twin
Towers. The fall of the western land. Here we see Burroughs and Stockhausen doing a
dance macabre through the smoke of the dead white-male-anglo-saxon-protestant-em-
pire. Here we see Edward Saïd surfing the Arab waves of self-representation to disinte-
grate the power of western ethnography. Here we see Chinese neo-liberalism taking over
the world market and establishing migratory fluxes. Here we see the wave of western
poverty producing dynamics of “low-cost culture” and new social stratifications. Here we
see neo-media flowering from the humus of convergence, and here we see the crisis of
politically correct ideology: both as a linguistic purification and as a tool of cultural re-
search and political transformation. Finally we feel the return of the body and its fluids
after more then twenty years of digital orgy. Here we can apply the dialectics between
virtualisation and actualisation put forward by French epistemologist Pierre Levy in his
famous work Qu’est-ce que le virtuel?, to the post-modern and contemporary moments. If
virtualisation represents problematic abstraction through technological prostheses, the
return of the new body is the actualisation of total social reign in disjointed spaces and
times from the pre-virtual experience intended as an ecstatic moment: ex-stasis.
The Body of Pornography: For an Anthropology of Arousal

“Queer studies” distinguish the new body from the historification of the G/L/B/T com-
munity, and in a certain way, as Nietzsche says, from the “active amnesia” intended as
the abandon of memory as a weight that situates, produces and owns the present. The
idea is still “anomic” and “dialogic” so it still addresses the survival of freedom outside
strict identity definitions. Being “dialogic” means starting to penetrate and deconstruct
the G/L/B/T community as a “text”; understanding how its gentrification produces new
bodyscapes of subversion. Certainly, one of the major perspectives through which we
can take a momentary lapse of excitation is independent pornography. In the neo-con-
temporary age, surviving against postmodernism as a historicised moment — especially
if related to digital culture — pornography is such a huge object of study, producing so
many subjectivities in terms of action that it cannot be easily circumscribed; honestly,
this is not even my method. In any case, D.I.Y. sex work is a major topic in contempo-
rary queer culture, and pornographic production is part of it. To shape pornography as
a tool of radical subversion I need to return to an important cultural anthropological
theme, namely identity. In order to give you a taste of what pornography means to me,
I wish to quote Barbara DeGenevieve’s definition of porn which is taken from her work
“The Hot Bods of Queer Porn”:
Porn is made to get people off. In order to do this, bodies must not only be highly sexual-
ized, but objectified, fetishized, eroticized and made to accommodate very particular in-
dividual kinks. Political correctness has become an intellectual prison within which an
extremely limited dialogue can take place, and in fact where monologues and diatribes
are usually the discursive practice. Embracing the need to objectify and be objectified,
to fetishize and be fetishized, to play the willing victim as well as the victimizer, opens
up a mine field that will be difficult to traverse, but it is a more intellectually provocative
and honest terrain from which to understand who we are as complex sexual beings…
Adopting a punk ethic: I love the idea of pornography as a fist in the face of the moral-
istic leftist majority scared to face the honesty of bodies and fluids. Especially in Italy,
where patriarchal culture and Catholicism are huge repressive apparatuses that exercise
their untouchable, invisible power mechanisms daily—even the most libertarian areas
of political action exert repressive moral values. The desemantisation/liberation of bod-
ies in pornography therefore has an important and experimental goal to attack these
repressive moral values. To understand how pornography becomes political through
breaking out of the normalising “erotica” field, I would like to refer to Pier Paolo Pa-
solini. He was an honest subversive Italian pornographer. He wanted to give libertar-
ian erections to the left in the seventies. It is important to underscore how much he
was inside his films in terms of arousal and, most of all, how in Salo o le 120 giornate di
264 C’Lick Me
sodoma, he needed to destroy all the moral values of the poor Italian seventies Catholic
and macho left-wing culture, not just by theatricising it, but by taking a pornographic,
arousing and ecstatic part in it. Again, pornography is a state of ecstatic trance. It is the
pleasure of bringing down the barriers between the internal and external perception
of the body. It is the destruction of the erotic melody. It is the rush of amphetamine in
your synapses. It is the primal noise in your genitals and living organs. It modifies your
perception. It is like Stockhausen, Glass and Reich’s reiterative sound syntaxes. It is like
electronic music, four/four, 909 straight hardcore techno kick. It is what Brian Eno said
in “Oblique Strategies” (1975) about “repetition as a form of change.” I do think that
the concept of “hard core” can be group mathematics which unifies countercultures:
punk/techno and pornography. In all of them there is the concept of the radicalised,
expanded, multiplied and exposed body. Going back to Barbara De Genevieve’s defini-
tion, I think that there is a basic level through which pornography belongs to “cultural
studies.” This can be done by analysing it as a text, namely as:
1) political, within the mechanism of radical transformation, collapsing moral barriers

and gender definitions
2) anthropological, on the level of representation (and politically speaking, on the level
of self-representation)
3) sociological, in terms of the space of the production of social relationships
4) psychological/psychoanalytical, in terms of the mechanisms of arousal
5) semantic/semiotic, in terms of the production of meanings and definitions
6) economic, in terms micro/macro analysis
This is the body field I refer to when speaking about pornography.
What is a Bear? Dead End of a Naturalist Gay Male Subculture

If we analyse the perception of the body in relation to changing social and cultural iden-
tities, we arrive at an understanding of how it has brought down social mores by defining
its own culture in a post-modern citizenship process; by virtualising identity through the
G/L/B/T community. The Bear community is a late product of this process and the end
of biological supremacy in terms of masculine representation. We arrive then at the
main question: what is a Bear? We can answer that by following the works of Les Wright,
gay studies researcher, professor, founder of the Bear History Project, and writer/curator
of THE BEAR BOOK: Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subcul-
ture, THE BEAR BOOK II: Further Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay
Male Subculture, curator of the e-zine Verisimilitude and more. He always answers by
not answering, by saying that there is not a real unilateral definition of what a Bear is. I
would like to propose a vision of Bear identity as an open opus of masculine definition/
representation inside the homosexual sphere. Historically and geographically speaking,
the spread of the Bear community started in the US in the early eighties. Les Wright fo-
cuses on the same-sex attraction not just as a biological input, but as a social and cul-
tural construction of the self in terms of realisation. If “coming out” can be represented
by an inner narrative of the self (as an elaboration of gender politics), perceiving our-
selves as Bears means to expand, extend, and multiply this process: it is a much more
complex narrative, a sub-cultural/countercultural depth beneath the surface of the gay
mainstream. Wright continues by affirming that the homosexual mediascape continued
producing interpretative models for same-sex relationships that were still oriented to-
wards bipolar gender dialectics, extending from wolves vs. fairies to macho leathermen
vs. queens. After the Stonewall riot and the beginning of the gay movement as a politi-
cal, cultural and social force, the heterosexual interpretation of homosexual relations
was deconstructed in favour of a hippy androgynous imaginary mixing up cross-dressers,
transsexuals, butch dykes and homosexuals. The Bear identity emerges from an exas-
peration with this model, and the historification of a masculine representation from the
B/D and S/M leather scene. The new entry is as a counter identification from the narra-
tive of the -ism: as juveniles, perfectionism, androgyny; Bears, as homosexual men aes-
thetically defined by strong presence, hair, beards, bellies, and blue-collar looks
proposed their difference as an integrative safe space for them and their lovers and ad-
mirers. This was based on a pre-existent body politics of fat men called Girth and Mirth,
who proposed the chub man in the mid-seventies as a weight to squeeze the gay imposi-
tion of the young, blonde, effeminate, suntanned, perfect, smiling, I-can-do-what-ever-I-
want gay man. Even if it worked on masculinity, the early Bear movement was a very
queer one because it created an aggregation of all the big wild freaks, bikers and weir-
does who did not fit in. They developed strategies to resist the assimilation at the very
beginning of the gay gentrification. Again, Bears had a very positive influence in the be-
ginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, by producing a social space for positive people and
not only that, they produced a safe space for aged people, by fetishising maturity as a
masculine element of sexual arousal. Being a culture of the radical body that expanded
itself in many different contexts and fetish scenarios, Bears had their own pornography
as an important space of acceptance, self-expression, and socio-sexual socialisation. Bear
magazine produced by Brush Creek Media, was the most important pornographic me-
dia that defined the standard of all porn magazines for Bears, with an editorial structure
organised around Bear models, Bear fiction, a deepening space of thought and ads.
From the fanzine format to the glittering magazine, the step was very short and fast.
Brush Creek Media produced the standard of the Bear and the new masculinity by the
iconographisation of big hairy men like Jack Radcliffe, Mac, Steve Hurley/Tit Pig, Bill
Addams, Buddy LaRue and many more. This was still the tape and paper media era,
when technology was based on huge hardware volumes, magazine pages stuck together
with sperm from jerking off and bulletin board systems that were more important then
ArpaNet/later/Internet. As a matter of fact, frequency modulation and demodulation as
system of network communication gave strong input to the development of the Bear
community, structuring the basic network of the BML (Bear Mailing List), the official
mailing list for Bears to define a new language. It was actualised through Bear parties,
Bear weekends and Bear clubs all over the US. The more digital communication spread
266 C’Lick Me
via the Internet, the more this phenomenon began to spread all over the world. Bear
identity, even if multiplied in its insider identities, was structured more and more by the
Bear contests whose winners became the cover stars of magazines that proliferated after
Bear magazine, and Bear porn stars. This created a market unit that became highly val-
uable as a niche. Personal websites and Internet Bear communities (like “Bear quay” or
“Bear resources” websites) exploded, with huge databases of Bear phenomena from all
over the world. Increasingly, Bear pornography slipped into the spiral of the virtualisa-
tion process. Now screens started getting sticky because of good muscular scrotal appa-
ratuses. That was parallel of the I.R.C. communication system that gave the M.U.D.
environments a dynamic and friendly use by a small free software called M.irc emulated
by another one called Ircle for Mac users. That was the real explosion of “chats” as a
popular communication system, and bearchats with its own languages and semantics.
You could find endless channels for endless bearfades on endless servers. The connec-
tion between mark-up language programmed personal web pages and the chat was im-
mediate because the latter gave you the time and rhythm of socio-sexual relationships,
and the former the space and status of personal views. I believe that the concept of the
profile as a unit of measurement, specifically for Bear relationships inside the netporn-
scape, comes from this connection. After giving the basic elements of Bear history and
its pornography within the shifts between paper, cassettes and virtualia, what is essential
to focus on here is that a new transformation occurred after the end of gay culture.
What is called “beardom” as a huge sexual, cultural, social and political scape of Bears
extending from meetings to the web, is over; it was not able to escape the gentrification
process of G/L/B/T community. Metaphors aside, most of the historic Bear culture pro-
moters from around the world are physically dead. David Hooker, the webmaster of
“Bear Quay,” is dead. The second BLM System operator, Alex Schell is dead. Lurch,
one of the First IBR (International Bears Rendez-vous) promoters is dead. Brush Creek
Media, the most important producers of Bear pornography, was busted and closed due
to financial problems. The continuous iconographisation of the Bear body and its repre-
sentation of masculinity has saturated gay media with endless magazines published us-
ing exactly the same format, structure, contents and aesthetics. The same applies to
HTML Bear websites. Identity happened and died within. At the same time, this sense
of homosexual post-mortem gave life to spaces where Bears would not be “the funny fat
passive average guy next door” anymore. You find people with high levels of diabetes,
necroses and amputations, heart attacks, bulimia, radical bone deformations and lipo-
suctions. At the same time, the de-mediatisation of HIV as a popular illness made an
epidemic come back stronger than ever with a mutation of dynamics supported by its
sister, syphilis. A documentary entitled The Gift by Louise Hogarth underlines the dead-
end of gay culture and Bear culture within it, analysing contemporary unsafe homosex-
ual behaviour and the narrative of harm reduction that the G/B/L/T produced,
unchaining a cultural black out. It is enabled by a contradictory communication of the
impossibility to justify the increase of HIV/AIDS contemporary to the political correct-
ness in the communication of positive people acceptance and the terrorist warnings of
the equivocation of AIDS to death. This communications merry-go-round encourages

men to fetishise HIV, pushing them to become “bug chasers” researching the “gift giv-
ers” in conversion parties. This is supported by a huge bareback culture boosted by the
nihilistic vision of life and approach to homosexuality. The bareback pornography mar-
ket has seen a huge increase that plays on unprotected sex as the ultimate masculine
sodomy, as something for a real man who likes to give it and take it RAW.
World-Wild Woofers. Profile Netlanguage as Masculine

Self-Representation
In the ongoing developments of open-source web environments and the dynamic con-
tribution of web content by individuals, we are undergoing a profound communications
revolution in the Bear mediascape . This strong transformation strikes almost all the old
Bear profile-based websites and the whole worldwide web. Those websites usually offer
a free profile service. The profile is intended as a free webpage where the hypertextual
structure defines a series of facts organised through a main picture, secondary pictures,
a self introductory text describing the reasons of the online presence, a personal e-mail
and/or a personal website link. With the interface being the filter of social action and
consumption defining new roles, new norms, new identities and new languages, we can
now focus on its changes as a radical transformation for the human and sexual percep-
tion. The starting point which gave life to a whole new way to build socio-sexual rela-
tionships by elaborating new network engineering and new markets, is based on a series
of innovations whose strongest trait is the real time web site “communicative navigabili-
ty.” This means building the possibility to integrate the idea of a chat with what the am-
bient was (Internet Relay Chat), to the possibility of visualising the other without the
hardware and software implications of a videoconference. The profile concept was “in
vitro” in videoconference software like CU-See-Me, Icuii, or Ispq, Ivisit etc. These kinds
of software were based on servers who gave lists of participants in specific rooms. It was
easy to get an idea of who was behind the nickname by clicking on the nickname link a
small window with a small picture appeared and a small text and a link to the personal
page. This idea was developed as the basic unit for the new profile-based websites. This
acceleration of information was propelled by the friendly use of the interface through
the possibility of bypassing the webmaster to individually upload and shape contents in
a small self-published and self-directed personal webpage. And here we are with the in-
formational Big Bang that happened just by applying this concept on the web renewing
the old Bear websites with the traditional html programmed pages. From there on, we
witnessed a double process: a restylisation of old websites and a demographic explosion
of Bear profile-centred new websites, which multiply the services in an oligopoly of pro-
posals. The phenomenon can be read from a media analysis perspective by trying to use
the models of the convergence. Theoretically speaking, the theme of convergence is de-
fined as a communicative moment where old and new media integrate themselves in
one macromedia, using the digital platform as shared base. This moment gives life to
hybrid media creatures like webTV, net radios, Internet through cell phones or game
268 C’Lick Me
consoles and so on. We can see this kind of process summarised in the profile-based
websites (Bears-non Bears) where text, video, pictures become completely self-organised
on a digital base. This free access and registration to most of those websites creates a
qualitative economy in terms of participation. The more the website is utilised (creating
a community), the more the passage of information produces content-oriented banners
and a peripheral services market. In terms of Bear oriented content, we can see the
blooming of bear products like Bear porno (either on-line or through DVD or videocas-
settes productions). Bear merchandising (from mouse pads to clothes, passing through
everything Bear related). The second source of economy production is the membership
to the websites. This kind of approach defines a liberation economy, which sets the in-
formation as free and shared, giving basic services and communication infrastructures
for Bears. Take the German –Dutch website Gayroyal.de for example which hosts most-
ly northern European Bears (but it is opened to all kinds of gay people). It gives a 24-
hour access with a multiple research key to the profiles. The service is based on a profile
that contains: main profile picture plus more side pictures and short videos to upload,
free self pornographic contents without any censorship (besides the use of the Adult
Check or a password to get access), introductive text with e-mail and personal URL link,
message exchange through a personal forum, one-to-one web chat possibility, peer-to-
peer web chat possibility organised on content channels, discussion groups with the pos-
sibility of one’s own community, and the possibility to rate the profile and check who
surfed on the profile, and to see who put the profile in his pal list. Ninety percent of this
proposal is free. Those who wish to support the website can buy extra services with the
membership. The most astonishing and widespread phenomenon in terms of Bear pro-
file-based websites for francophone and anglophone users is Bearwww.com. But before
speaking of Bearwww.com, we should introduce its ancestor Bear411.com that tripled
its proposal and changed its communicative strategies in order to be active and com-
pletely up-to-date. Bear411.com was one of the first websites to propose this kind of in-
terface based on pop-up profiles that allow a personal chat and the quick building of a
new Bear community. Its webmaster, Gregg, quadruplicated the communities by giving
birth to Eurowoof.com for the European bearscape while Bear411.com remained for
American users, then Bearworld.com and Bearguide. all websites are interconnected;
the users may have access to both the profile areas from both the websites. The most in-
telligent thing that Gregg from Eurowoof/Bear411 did is creating a third content space
called Bearguide.com. This is a web site with database technology with the same meth-
ods of self-publishing through specific formats, dedicated to the information of Bear
meetings and Bear activities from all over the world. Bearguide.com is connected to
Bear411.com and Eurowoof.com giving the possibility to the Bears to point the next
Bear meeting that they shall attend, by having the link directly in their profile. At the
same time, the website provides a profile research engine system through the Bear meet-
ing keys. This creates a social psychological mechanism of fast Bear community spread-
ing because of all the circuit Bears addicted to the electricity and adrenaline produced
by developing expectations in terms of friendship, sexuality and love through the net.
It’s very interesting to see here the social fallings of Levy’s actualisation process as the fi-
nal part of the virtualisation of social relationship that creates human change through
the disconnection of body and human interaction. This kind of dynamics produces a
double magnetism: on the one hand, the site is visited by Bears who want to meet each
other in the real; on the other, it is connected to all the organisations who provide the
meetings. This entails a double information economy for the website. A small furry
smart man gives the answer to Bear411/eruowoof/Bearguide from Paris. His name is
Fred and he is the engineer/webmaster/owner of Bearwww.com. This website came out
as a kind of challenge. The format is more or less the same. The free pages host profiles
with side pictures and introductive texts applied on a communication network based on
the psychic trap of pop-up chat which brings the life of a man in a 2 x 3 inch window
that comes out of your screen, straight in your face. In the space/time of few months
there’s been a big bang of a new furry hot galaxy transforming the world wide web in a
world wild WOOF! Thousands and thousands of daily contacts and profiles popping up
every hour declare Bearwww.com one of the most popular Bear profile based websites
all over the world redefining the Bear culture in terms of languages and identities. Surf-
ing profiles is building a huge open opus of Bear life; experiences and self produced
pornography. The introductory test inside the profile varies from a simple question mark
through cut-ups where Bears introduce desires, songs lyrics, poetry, activities promo-
tion, viral marketing or just links, all in a limited text space. Following the texts we can
see specific picture narratives splitting into two macro-categories:
1) Bears who do not want to be recognised and therefore only expose parts of their na-
ked bodies. This because they are mostly oriented towards sex and, moreover, because
they have not come out. Socially and culturally speaking, this kind of appearance is typi-
cal from Catholic and homophobic countries like southern Europe. Most of the men
who do not put their face in the profile are middle-aged, and a large percentage of them
are married to women. Usually most people on-line do not answer men without the face
in the profile, but at the same time there are others who only look for them because it’s
like an assurance of direct sexual actions with no dramas and often, most of the Bears
without a face on the profile are equipped with web cams or pictures to send directly to
the e-mail of the pretender.
2) Bears who want LTRs (long-terms relationships) try to show the most they can in or-
der to leave a possible track to follow. These kinds of people use five pictures uploads as
some kind of a Bear peep show allowing the voyeurs to discover themselves in five click-
ing steps arriving at a naked picture right at the very end. In both cases the more the
profile is uploaded and restyled, the more it will be hit and checked, becoming a live
immaterial object: a small open window in the world of a big furry man.
Between and beyond these two polarisations of endless existential narratives of emo-
tions, intellectualities, loves, exhibitionisms, voyeurisms, sexualities, dreams, hopes,
fears, fantasies, crying, sadness and solitudes. It is of deep interest here to do a content
270 C’Lick Me
analysis of the profile search engines inside the websites from the more generalist Bear
websites like Bearwww or Bear411 to the identity oriented websites like Silverdaddies.
com, Bearwww.com started the research keys with four polarising identities like: Bears,
chubs, cubs, daddies, chasers, and admirers. Now the webmaster added, couples, and
after that muscle Bears. This happens because of a continuous interaction with the us-
ers, which ask for new categories to look for. The search engine becomes a mirror of
the users Bear perception defining/micro identities with its norms, its cultures, its lan-
guages. It’s even interesting to see the Bear photographers’ aesthetics through the Bear
profiles. W e can see Bear photographers involved like Lynn Ludwig, Cybears, Gianor-
so, Antinoo, PhotoBear and many more. This creates some kind of a hierarchy of A or
B Bears; where Bears are recognised from Bear photographers or Bear magazines or
Bear video productions and the rest of the Bear world. Offline gatherings are actualising
this trend which is emerging from these kind of Bear communities. Following the first
Bearwww meeting in Cologne during the Bear pride in 2003 (organised by Photobear,
Epicentro Ursino Romano — the Bear group that I founded in Rome four years ago
www.epicentroursino.com) the biggest Bearwww offline meeting was organised in
Rome during the Toga Party International Bear Weekend 2004, and it is producing a
new meeting which gathers all those living profiles from all over the world.
Bearabism.
Ethnic Masculinity and Pornographic Exoticisation
Three years ago I was at the Baerennacht/Bear Pride in Cologne, one of the biggest
bearmeetings in the world. I was hanging out in the offices of the German Bear Maga-
zine when I saw another magazine called Alcazar. The cover was incredibly appealing.
The logo was written in an arabesque script. On the cover was a huge Turkish man with
jet black eyes and moustache, thick arms and legs, a big butch belly, a tempest of hair
that was spreading on his chest and belly like a hurricane bringing the viewer directly to
the eye of the storm of the image: his huge fat cock shot in wild erection. The only thing
he was wearing was a red Fez on his mature bald head, which he sported like a military
recruit. And in his hands he held up a shiny silver sword as if it were the most important
of the two erections. Of course I too had an erection, and that made me instantly want
to buy the magazine that cost half of as much as the traditional German Bear Magazine.
I consumed this pornography voraciously, using it for various jack-off sessions. None-
theless, I felt there was something going on here that was turning me off a bit. There
was a disturbing element: a subtle base line that I was about to discover. First of all the
editorial structure was exactly like the other bearporn magazines: editorials, big naked
hairy men showing off, fiction/short stories, ads, banners and advertising. The language
used was not Turkish or Arab or bilingual, but German. The only difference was based
on the cast and the set. The models were all ethnically defined in terms of aesthetics:
big fat, hairy, moustached, dark-skinned, lascivious men, mostly naked or dressed up in
typical Arab clothes, shoes, and accessories. The sets made a difference too. Bear por-
nography reflects western male stereotyping. Most of the contexts where masculinity is
(re)produced are based on working class imagery: truckers parking/cruising areas, parks
and forests, warehouses, policemen or military backgrounds, sports backgrounds, finally
arriving at middle class white-collar imagary in offices, backyards, and pools. In Salazar,
most of the sets are outdoors and look eastern/Palestinian in terms of nature. That spleen
of deplacement invaded my senses and made me start researching where the magazine
was produced. I discovered that it was a German product for German/European Bears,
specifically oriented to countries whose immigrant populations are basically South East-
ern, and specifically, Turkish. Bingo. The picture was clear. I was participating in an
operation of gender replacement through the exoticisation of masculinity. This means
that western homosexual models of old Europe have arrived at their dead end, need-
ing to recall through the “real,” imported masculinity. “Real” masculinity can’t be re-
placed with real eastern male identity, because it would not feed the western need for
erections if not function in terms of stereotyping. Cultural studies critic James Clifford,
in his famous work entitled The Pure Products Go Crazy, analysed how the concept of
“authenticity” grew up as a form of power in human sciences. It emerged from the west-
ern ethnographic power to define how otherness developed in the history of cultural an-
thropology, folding them to the interests of the western legitimacies. This is more or less
what is happening in German/Northern Europe Bear pornography, where western Bear
porn publishing is “editing” ethnicity as a sexual need to feel the exploited male stere-
otypes. The west is eating itself through ethnicity in male-to-male pornography, through
the exoticisation of masculine representation. I then started to jerk-off on this concept
that was much more arousing. Following this ethnic line, I discovered a growing world
of masculine representations through eastern exoticisation. Hairturks.com is the biggest
and most important pole where this sliding identity game is enacted. The largest devel-
opment of this website is Germany and France: basically Northern Europe. The site is
dynamic and based on a database architecture made by a profile system. As the domain
of the website ‘Hairy Turks’ suggests, the only distinctive trait from sites like Bearwww.
com, Bear411.com, Silverdaddies.com, is that they focus on ethnicity. The concept of
ethnicity here is expanded to all the easts and souths of the world. Communication strat-
egies of male representation are vastly applied. Most of the profiles are faceless because
this gives the western masturbator the thrill of an identity that is much more gender de-
fined since the national side of it imposes a cultural repression that underlines the “au-
thenticity” of masculinity. A little different but conceptually similar is Moi-kelma.org.
This is a typical website that sells “beur” masculinity (which is not to be confused with
“bear”). The word “beur” comes from “verlan,” a specific syntactical system which re-
verses words so they cannot be understood which developed from the second and third
generation of North African/Arab immigrants who are mostly westernised, but living in
poverty and disenfranchisement on the periphery of large French metropoles like Paris
or Marseille. Also known as “Racaille,” this ethnic juvenile area became a new stere-
otype in gay male iconography producing the ultimate fetish for hard masculinity in
French countries (and others). Graphically speaking, the site conjures the idea of Tur-
key with a K depicted in a moon and a star. Again, to choose the language of the home
272 C’Lick Me
page, the access flags are are in the following order: French, English, Spanish, German,
and Italian. The text on the website says “Kelma: Arabs, Moroccans, Algerians, Tuni-
sians, Africans, gays in France and Europe.” Parallel to Kelma there is a porn produc-
tion company called Casbah Films whose website says: “Gay porno for the Arab lovers
who don’t have cold eyes [are brave].” The website has Arab script, but again, the pro-
duction is for “Arab Lovers.” Arab language appears as some kind of escamotage to un-
derline the concept of authenticity. This is more than clear if we do a content analysis of
DVD promotion kits on the website. From the “Gypsy Sex” promotion page we read:
JNRC a inflitré le zones à risqué dans l’est des Balkans frontière avec la Turquie. De
nouveaux acteurs sauvages prêt a tout pour se vider le breloques. Sur le premier passif
qui prendra se role … un nager venu avec a meuf très vulgaire et au langage guttural
pousse son mec a servir de passif, soumis à cette gueuze, il s’execute sense broncher…et
se donne pour la première fois devant la camera de JNRC (another porno production
working with Arab imagery).
The masculine representation aspect of the text produces the idea of animalistic ethnics
ready to find whatever hole to empty their scrotums with a savage fuck. The animalistic
representation of ethnicity based on:
1) the geographical context

2) the guttural/animal sounds instead of language, rather than proper French
3) the use of “verlan” (“meuf” is the reverse of “femme”) in the description
4) the female element in order to underscore the heterosexual masculinity as stronger
5) the total top role in fucking
Bulls Empire. Morphing Culture

Following the end of postmodernism and gay culture within it, and in response to the
masculine reappropriation through the fetishisation of the Arab ethnicity as a sign of
the radical change in the gender imagination, we further a specific kind of practice per-
forming western hypermasculinity through net pornography. All starts from a post-bear
Yahoo group called “Bulls Empire.” Surfing through it I found a very interesting essay
signed from the Bulls Empire owner, aka Bullneck. In “Introduction to Bulls and the
BullEmpire Group,” he traces the roots of masculinities inside northern American and
western homosexual culture to define routes of new masculinities development as sub-
cultural formation, iconographies and independent pornographic production from the
Bear mainstream. Bullneck starts defining the macho code “…from the halcyon days
of the butch biker/leather-daddy, through the 1970s Castro clone look, up to the mod-
ern pervasive conception and commodification of gay men as twinkish, hairless, blond,
youth-obsessed Chelsea boys who have a penchant for interior design and female-vo-
cals-centric techno music…” That was the fertile humus where the Bear culture came
from, opening its own socio-sexual spaces of desire and different aesthetics (with the
hair/size/age variables intervening) to survive the statistics of a post-seventies gay era.

A new masculinity started to be performed while developing and crystallising the Bear
identity through its icons and rites. Bullneck says that as soon as the institutionalisation
of the sub/bear/identities rhizome took over, they formed their own social spaces and
cultures (seeing chubs, muscle Bears, Gen X Bears) which contradicted the “A” Bears
icons and pornographic market over-saturation, the Bear culture thus diluted itself, los-
ing its inner meaning in masculine performance. This is where “bulls” come out wit-
nessing the detritus of the Bear culture and stomping out their mass rage through new
masculine performance. Bullneck starts his definition by saying:
Bull is, of course, not a new term of anthropomorphic description, either within the gay
or straight communities. It has long been used as a root-word to describe a combination
of strength, size, and attitude, whether it’s the word “bullish,” “bullneck,” or “bull-dyke.”
Hence, in my mind, Bull is a fitting term for a new class of men who embody the traits
of great brute strength, a large bulky body, and (when possible) an attitude of smug ag-
gression. There’s no focus on body-hair, in my view, with regard to Bulls; Bulls can be
either hairy as all hell, or not. Bulls may or may not have facial hair, as well, though
all bulls ideally should have short haircuts. Some examples of archetypal bulls include:
power lifters, American and Canadian football offensive linemen, off-season bodybuild-
ers or those who lift purely for size and not definition, rodeo bull-doggers, some of the
larger rugby props, and thick-necked law enforcers and military personnel. These types
combine the best elements of beefiness, power, and actively expressed aggression. Typi-
cal synonyms for bulls can include Meathead, Ox, Moose, Hoss, Goon, Guido, Bubba
and Lug. The youth variant for a bull is Bullpup — much like Cub is the youth variant
for Bears. With these basic outlines of Bull imagery, I believe the potential exists for a
full-on development of a Bull sub-culture. It may at first find itself attached to the Bear
movement, but in time, I see the chance to develop it as a fully independent movement,
especially in regards to the traits of bull-attitude. Whereas Bears, in general, have a
neutral or even warm fuzzy demeanour, Bulls should have an actively furrowed brow,
a firm smirk, and a proclivity to use force to get what they want. It is with trait that we
may see the most potential for self-declaration and expansion.
What we find here is a recall to the western iconographical masculinity as the omega
from the alpha process of bearabist ethnic fetishisation. The interesting aspect is that
Bullneck questions the Bull identity by proposing an immediate meta-thought about
the sense of being a bull. He asks himself:
- Is the description of Bulls as mentioned expansive enough, or too limited?
- How important is attitude to you as opposed to pure image and body-type?
- Are there standards for what bulls wear?
- Are there alternative viewpoints on what bulls or Bears are?
- How realistic are the chances to develop these ideas as a new gay sub-culture?
- What are the political implications, if any, to these ideas?
274 C’Lick Me
- Are there additional or alternative synonyms for Bulls?

- Are there regional (US South vs. US North) or international (English, German,
French, Latin American, etc.) variants of bulls?
This enquiry is radicalised by the answers of bulls and bull admirers who take back
the concept of anthropomorphism as a metaphor of transformation, developing a mor-
phing culture as an approach to the extreme of hypermasculinities. The leader of this
form of masculine visual art is GB Morph with his website gbmorphs.com. The start-
ing idea is to define the relationship of bull traits in terms of aesthetics and attitude and
expand them to the limits of human. Muscle explodes, bellies become solid and tough,
hair grows all over, cocks become monsters, veins pump blood, masculinities become
authoritarian and aggressive, man become beast. This radical call for masculine reap-
propriation bases itself on another form of fetishisation that is based on morphing tech-
niques. The penetration of fiction through hypereality pushes bull admirers to imagine
those human monsters becoming real, right through the computer screen. This kind of
material is mixed up with porno bombing and daily life pictures of the new renaissance
man through Yahoo groups such as Bulls Empire, GB Morphs and Brute Morphs. The
confrontation about models and techniques, about morphed photos and morphed draw-
ings, shows a total disconnection from what is proposed as bull intended as masculine
performance in the western (mostly American) daily life.
Transbears. Masculinities Through Bodies

Three years ago I attended a “Le Tigre” concert in Rome. “Le Tigre” is the electronic
incarnation of the “Bikini Kill,” a female lesbian feminist punk band based in NY. Well,
while looking at the merchandise desk, I saw the back of this man. He had great, big,
wide shoulders, shaved hair, a baseball cap, a flannel shirt, dirty rotten 501 Levis with
a red hanky in the left pocket (top fister) and Caterpillar boots revealing fat feet, big fat
hands moving t-shirts from one side to another. My knees started to shake and I started
to put myself in the WARBEAR MODE, thinking about what kind of seduction strat-
egy I would deploy in order to hook-up with him. When he turned his face to the desk I
discovered that he was a she. Fuck, I had a hard-on!!!!! That experience shocked me for
a while. Around the same time, I was following a discussion on the BML about Tranny
Bears. So even though I am quite settled and focused on a specific imaginary, I was able
to pass through gender barriers and to question the concept of masculinity, transform-
ing it into “masculinities,” but still, starting with masculine representation. This made
me pose a number of questions about gender, masculinity and bearness. What arouses
me in a masculine representation? Is the idea of a peculiar kind of body “hair-size-age”
around a cock or is male genitalia a symbolisation of masculinity that can be removed
in the production of arousal? How much is sodomy important in the reproduction of
masculinities through the narratives of pornography especially through the fact that in
Bear pornography penetration covers a very small percentage? So what defines mascu-
linity in Bear culture if the mechanism of identification is based on specific fetishes that
pass through beards, weights, age and looking butch? What I look for in pornography is
to get turned on by masculine representations. I am interested in how this big, heavy,

hairy, fat, sweaty, tough, bearded, inked, pierced, hardcore masculinities can be repre-
sented through different bodies. And it is happening more and more that all those char-
acteristics are much honestly expressed by butch dykes and f to ms better than from the
institutional Bear pornography with historical mainstream Brush Creek Media stars. I’d
like to think about “BUTCHFUCKS” as intergender categorisation of pornography that
deals with masculinity crossing Bear pornography too. To give a more intense weight
to this topic we can relate to Ron Suresha research. Through his work entitled “Bears
on Bears” Suresha was the only theoretician who dared to rip the curtains of Bear dog-
matism by deepening and analysing the Transbear phenomenon. He organised a Panel
discussion that became a chapter entitled “Lesbears and Transbears: Dykes and FTMs
as Bears.” The intervening characters to this panel were Sharon Bear Bergman, Drew
Campbell, Mike Hernandez and Matt Rice; all gender twisters identifying themselves
as Bears. In all the confronting experiences of being identified as Bears without having
male genitals, the interlocutors underline that beards, butch presence and straight-act-
ing produced the excitation. A leitmotiv of all voices is the identification on the be/
coming part of the Bear phenomenon intending it as the pleasure to abandon range of
imposed gay identities and to set the masculine side free as a socio-sexual space of ac-
ceptance. But, again, what happens when this masculine side has mixed body elements
that are transitory in terms of sexual orientations? What if a big fat hairy bearded man
with tits and without cock discovers himself to be gay and sexually bottom? It is interest-
ing to understand that in being Bear culture — based on a language of touch, grope and
male body impact through wrestling and fighting — a strong feeling of deplacement is
produced when groping finds tits on a bearded hairy man body. This is what happened
to Matt Rice while working as bartender at the “Lone Star Saloon” (the Bear mecca
in San Francisco), and introduces another DeGenevieve concept: “the pornographic
sublime.” Starting to from the previous definition of pornography, We apply here the
concept of sublime used in Lyotard Literature as the pleasure of displeasure. Doing a
history of the “Sublime” semantics, DeGenevieve affirms that its meanings come from
the 21st century where the word was associated with the idea of nature as an inspira-
tional muse. Something was removed from that meaning and it was the Kantian idea of
terror. Lyotard operates toward a reintegration of the dark side of the sublime meaning
intending it as outrage and disturbance to imagination. Referring to Kant, the more the
outrage was huge and wild, the more the experience was sublime. Phenomenologically
speaking, DeGenevieve affirms that pornography can be perceived as a possible space
for the sublime experiences in the exploration of bodies and identities. This is why I like
to apply this vision of the sublime category as a tool to interpret transbear masculinity as
a new model of masculine representation through netpornography. Experimentations
like Ssspread.com and No Fauxx are the perfect field to locate this experience. In both
websites masculinity is represented through bodies. The provocation of being homosex-
ually seduced from butchdyke big hairy harms that fists no/gender holes is sublime as
sublime is the prosthetic experience of naturalisation through the use of the condom on
276 C’Lick Me
a dildo. As exciting is the heterosexualiation of inverted gender codes where from mas-
culinity is performed by fucking MTF girls. Those are all topics, visions and shootings
expressed by the two areas of interventions which give use to the sense and sensibility of
our post-post modern sexual complexity through net performances of masculinities. My
sperm is actualised and it is difficult to clean the screen.
277
Ten Fragments on
a Cartography of Post-Pornographic Politics
Tim Stüttgen
1 Pose
Post-pornography lays claims to a critical, revolutionary potential within the regime of
sexual representation through performative excessiveness. But beware: This assertion
is camp, a vulnerable gesture situated between implicit, critical, denaturalising perfor-
mance and glamorous affirmation (Brecht/Warhol). This doesn´t mean that it cannot
have an effect on reality, though.
2 Sprinkle
Annie Sprinkle is the mother of post-porn.1 Her career can be read as the performance
of biopolitical de-identification: sex worker – porn performer – performance artist – pro-
sex feminist – happy-lesbian-love. Coming from the centre of the production of norma-
tive sex images, namely mainstream porn, Sprinkle abandoned the role of the victim in
order to develop sexual and artistic practices that no longer naturalise, but instead com-
ment, reflect and parody. This critical, performative approach to sex and image produc-
tion marks a paradigm change from porn to post-porn.
In the age of digital cameras, Internet sex chats and amateur performances, the het-
ero-normative dispositives of contemporary hegemonic porn incessantly attempt to beef
up the naturalisation effects of their images, to dispense with narration, and underscore
their pseudo-documentary interpretation of desire as an “event that actually took place.”
In following Sprinkle´s work (performances, body art, transgender sex films, photos, jour-
nalism, Tantra, burlesque, theatre), one encounters the potential diversity of a fund of
practices that not only pave the way for new forms of critical-deconstructivist representa-
tion, but also enable the invention of counter-strategies and alternative desires.
278 C’Lick Me
3 Re-actualisation
Post-pornography is a transversal concatenation permeating the most diverse areas of
sex and image production, be it on the Internet or in mass culture, in art or theory, in
micro- or macro-politics. One of today´s most prominent post-pornographic blueprints
stems from Beatriz Preciado, who not only publishes articles on a philosophy of post-
pornography but also organises workshops for drag kings in the queer underground, and
in 2004 – 2005 set-up a lab for the development of post-pornography at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, in which short films were produced and new collec-
tive body-sex performances were developed together with sex workers, artists and other
cultural producers, by employing practices such as S/M, or drag and objects such as dil-
dos or artificial arms. Preciado, too, makes reference to Sprinkle: “For me, the issue of
[…] pornography should be judged from the perspective of performance theory. That´s
something I learned from Annie Sprinkle.”2
4 Inscription
According to the fundamental analyses of the film scholar Linda Williams,3 pornogra-
phy consists in the staged re-inscription of the role relations of men as sadistic, domi-
nant and powerful, and women as masochistic, submissive and powerless. The woman,
subjected to the male gaze, admits that she desires this seemingly never-ending, identi-
cal narration of hetero-normative sex performance. The ultimate proof of the authen-
ticity of the event called “sex,” from which the male performer emerges as a symbolic
hero, is the cumshot, which functions as the climax and final proof that real sex has
taken place. Williams grasps pornography in the tradition of the biopolitical confessions
which Foucault examined in his “History of Sexuality”4 and understood as confessions
of an inner truth of gender subjects which, from then on, served to anchor sexual identi-
ties. Preciado calls attention to the fact that Foucault´s history of sexuality ended in the
19th century — prior to the development of photographic apparatuses.5
5 Queer Production
If queerness is associated with making the representation of gender ambivalent, one
strategy of post-porn would lie in complicating normative representation patterns in a
critical way. But as both Sedgwick6 and Preciado stress, post-porn also produces new
forms of sexual subjectivity. Acts such as drag, cruising or dildo sex are not to be under-
stood as the uncovering of the constructedness of heterosexual gender positions, but as
articulations of the body that possess their own spatialities and temporalities, and enable
alternative forms of social practice and the production of subjectivity — and thus alterna-
tive forms of sexual identity and subjectivity as well.
6 Female Masculinities
It seems to be the case today that post-porn is for the most part re-actualised in (post)
lesbian contexts. The performativity and production of masculinity with women in
genres such as butchness or drag kinging, all the way to the concrete materialisations
of transgender bodies, mark a paradigm change in the power relations of femininity and
masculinity. Post-porn takes note of masculinity´s arrival in the age of its performative
reproducibility and, after decades of deconstructing femininity, addresses the no less
constructed character of masculinity, which it expropriates from biological men.
7 Fetishes
Post-porn neither condemns the fetish nor does it raise questions as to lack. It instead in-
vestigates what can be created with the fetish. It doesn´t look at what might await us after
overcoming alienation, a perhaps happy natural state, but focuses on the de-naturalised
body technologies which we can create using the fetish, beyond the normative forms of
hetero-sex. Katja Diefenbach writes: “The question should not be whether beauty, sex,
fashion, and pornography cover up power, but with which practices they connect them-
selves to each other and the way in which they produce bodies and ways of life. It´s not
about uncovering but analysing.”7 A prominent example of the productive appropria-
tion of the fetish is Preciado’s departure from the status of the phallus and her philoso-
phy of the dildocrats. The penis possesses its own biopolitical history, with penis lengths
prescribed by medical dispositives and the destruction of deviant penis shapes, like in
the mutilation of the genitals of intersexuals. Preciado cites Derrida´s proposition that
the hetero-male power strategy consists precisely in maintaining that its own code is the
original and all others are fakes.8 For this reason, she prefers to speak of the dildo, which
she grasps as a part of the body that is a prosthesis.9 In her view, the dildo is replaceable
in many respects; an arm can be a dildo, as can a baseball bat, a bottle, or — a penis. And
the dildo belongs to no one: “The dildo negates the fact that desire is something that
takes place within an organ belonging to the self.”
8 Contrasex
In the “Contrasexual Manifesto,”10 Preciado proposes exercises to deterritorialise the
classical erogenous zones and instead open up new ones that have nothing to do with
the binary of man and woman and the reference to reproductive organs. To this end,
she lionises the proletarians of the anus, the founders of a new, contrasexual society:
The anus is radically democratic in that every body possesses one. And every sex pro-
tagonist participates in the production of culture: We are all sexual proletarians. This
appeal includes the production of the entire body of the people, it implies different
forms of the practice of relationships, the dissolution of family structures, the demystifi-
cation of heterosexual love, and the introduction of contractual sex, which subjects its
acts to critical debate and allows them to be negotiated in political terms. Post-porn and
contrasexuality influence and permeate each other. Parallels between sex films, as an
alternative form of cultural production, and the basic practices of economic and artistic
self-organisation in feminism, can be traced from Sprinkle´s call for women to produce
their own porn films,11 all the way to the DIY workshops of the queer underground porn
filmmakers GirlsWhoLikePorno (Barcelona).12
280 C’Lick Me
9 Belladonna
Post-pornography is not only produced on the fringes of queer contexts or the art scene.
The mainstream porn-star, Belladonna, displays parallels to Annie Sprinkle´s de-iden-
tificatory practice, without taking recourse to the linear narrative of the social rise from
a porn performer to an artist. Two years ago, Belladonna founded her own firm, “Bel-
ladonna Entertainment,” and rejected the classical patterns of hetero-sex. Beforehand,
she had been a masochistic icon of gonzo porn, which since the boom of digital cam-
eras, sells sex performances as being even more “authentic.” In addition to the shaky
hand-held-camera aesthetics and a documentary gesture having nothing to do with
glamorous studio sets, gonzo stands for an intensification of the body. Harder sex with
anal sex as a highlight, new gagging techniques (blow-jobs leading to the actress almost
suffocating), more salivation and stronger affects. Belladonna utilised the intensification
of gonzo sex for a line of flight away from the role of the passive female subject. She has
now directed more than a dozen lesbian films which, as a matter of course, include fun
and empathetically negotiate power relations anew. In Belladonna Fucking Girls Again
(2005), the director plays the role of a dominatrix with the submissive actress Melissa
Lauren. At one point she demands that Lauren stick an inflatable dildo into her mouth,
which, with the increasing influx of air, hardly reminds one of a penis anymore. Her
face turns red and becomes a (post-)vaginal centre of desire; Lauren gently caresses it
and kisses the tube out of Bella´s mouth. By means of a new body technology, power is
turned into a complex relation of forces that departs from the symbolism of the phallus
and the separation between dominant and submissive man and woman. In Fetish Fanat-
ic 4 (2006), Belladonna turns a jet of water in a bathtub into a dildo for herself, which
here doesn´t even possess the material, solid shape of a dildo. In the same performance
(with the dominatrix Sandra Romain), there is also a kissing scene in which the dildo
is shared by the mouths of the two performers, until it disappears. The reference to the
relation of phallus-dildo-power is thus entirely abolished. Both performers are at once
penetrators and the ones being penetrated, so to speak.
10 Post-pornographic Images
Merely a tendency towards post-pornographic images can be discerned, be it in the films
of Bruce LaBruce, Virginie Despentes and Hans Scheirl or in the photographs of Del
LaGrace Volcano. This is reminiscent of the concepts of movement-image and time-im-
age in Deleuze´s philosophy of film, in which they do not exist in a pure form but in
a resonating body, as it were — as approximations and in degrees.13 In general, one can
say that a post-porn image emancipates itself from the binary logic of hetero-power and
makes available potentials for other forms of representation-critical affirmation, which
make new subjectivities and power relations within the practice of sexuality conceiv-
able and debatable. In the best case, this results in affective singularities of lustful im-
age politics that smuggle themselves into the interface of theory and practice with the
aim of complicating it. In the process, the gender-specific and economic circumstances
of the works, as well as the fact that they are constructed, are suspended and put up for
consideration.
Present post-porn debates are far from possessing a unified strategy or position. For
example, while Sprinkle´s position can be interpreted as a campy, yet serious, claim to
brotherly/sisterly love and humanistic integration, the most determined counterposition
can be found in the anti-humanism of the queer theoretician Lee Edelman, for whom
post-porn images are (or can) only be produced in sexual acts that place the sexually iden-
titary mode of existence at risk. Terre Thaemlitz is also in line with such a position, yet he
addresses it in the form of institutional criticism (e.g., of the art market) or by questioning
the notion of subcultural community (e.g., queer communities).14 Diefenbach, on the
other hand, proposes conceiving post-pornography on this side of gestures of transgres-
sion and liberation or in relation to the symbolic law of the “big Other,” as a non-utopian
strategy aiming at different economies between bodies and desires.15
Notes
1 Cf. Sprinkle, A. (1998) Post-Porn Modernist, San Francisco.
2 Stüttgen, T. (2004) “Proletarier des Anus: Interview mit Beatriz Preciado, Teil 1,”
in Jungle World 48/04, p. 24.
3 Williams, L. (1995) Hard Core, Basel.
4 Foucault, M. (1978) History of Sexuality I: An Introduction, New York.
5 Preciado, B. (2005) “Gender Sex and Copyleft,” in Del LaGrace Volcano, Sex
Works, Tübingen, p. 152.
6 Sedgwick, E.K. (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham,
p. 149.
7 Diefenbach, K. (2006) “The Spectral Form of Value: Ghost Things and Relations
of Forces,” ed. S. Sheikh, Capital (It Fails us Now), Berlin.
8 Preciado refers to Derrida’s deconstruction of the French language as “original”
and “mother tongue” in relation to the minority migrant languages of Hebrew and
Algerian, in Derrida, J. (19980 Monolingualism of the Other; Or, the Prosthesis of
Origin, Stanford.
9 Stüttgen, T. “Proletarier des Anus: Interview mit Beatriz Preciado, Teil 1,” loc. cit., p. 24.
10 Preciado, B. (2004) Kontrasexuelles Manifest, Berlin.
11 Sprinkle, A. (2006) “Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn (New DVD-Edition with
Off-Commentary by Linda Williams, www.anniesprinkle.org.
12 For a view of the work of the Girlswholikeporno collective, visit their blog that in-
cludes clips, photos and commentaries: www.girlswholikeporno.com.
13 While Deleuze sees the actualisations of the movement-image in the linear, unin-
terrupted narration of Hollywood cinema, the time-image which he discovers, for
example, in the New Wave Cinema of post-war Europe (Italian neo-realism, Nou-
velle Vague, New German Cinema), is considered the result of a crisis in uninter-
rupted narration and the identification with the protagonist: the sudden entry of
exterior social conditions into the life of the main protagonist causes a shock that,
through events, introduces new temporalities into the narration and, hence, new
282 C’Lick Me
forms of thought. In a similar way, one could grasp post-pornographic image cat-
egories in relation to classical pornographic images that confront the heterosexually
identified narrative patterns of the sexual act with other sex events and plunge them
into a state of crisis. The development of these images can also be connected with
the historical events since 1968, the struggles of the feminist, gay, lesbian and queer
movements, which began at about the same time as the porn film market became
established — the double bind between porn and post-porn thus existed from the
very beginning.
14 Thaemlitz emphasised this in several statements during the final panel discussion
of the Post Porn Politics Symposium, Volksbühne, Berlin (15/10/2006).
15 Katja Diefenbach, “Dying in White: On Fetishistic Repetition, Commodity- and
Body-Experiences,” unpublished lecture given at the Post Porn Politics Sympo-
sium, Volksbühne Berlin (14/10/2006).
Section 4
BIOGRAPHIES AND WEBOGRAPHY

285
BIOGRAPHIES
Adam Arvidsson is associate professor of Media Studies at the University of Copenha-

gen. He is the author of Brands. Meaning and Value in Media Culture (London: Rou-
tledge, 2006), a book that examines the brand as a paradigmatic economic form for the
information economy. At present he is particularly interested in the relation between
value and affect in the information economy, and in the new economy of ethics and in
networked processes of creativity.
http://media.ku.dk, web.mac.com/adamerica/iWeb/AdamArvidsson
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi founded the magazine A/traverso (1975–1981) and was a member
of staff of Radio Alice—the first free radio station in Italy (1976–1978). He was involved
in the political movement of autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, then fled to Paris
where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980s,
he contributed to the magazine Semiotexte (New York), Chimerees (Paris), Metropoli
(Rome) and Musica 80 (Milano). He published Mutazione e ciberpunk (1993), Ciber-
nauti (1994), Felix (2001), Telestreet - Macchina immaginativa non omologata (2003).
Berardi is based in Bologna, Italy.
www.rekombinant.org
Manuel Bonik is author, DJ, artist, curator and IT-consultant and is currently writing his
dissertation on “Fehler als generatives System” (“Mistakes as generative system” — work-
ing title). Together with Oswald Wiener and Robert Hödicke, he published Eine ele-
mentare Einführung in die Theorie der Turing-Maschinen (An Elementary Introduction
286 C’Lick Me
to the Theory of the Turing-Machines (Vienna / New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998), a text-
book on automata theory. Bonik lives and works in Berlin.
manuel@nightacademy.net
www.nightacademy.net
www.bootlab.org
www.invalideale.de
Mikita Brottman, PhD, is Professor of Language, Literature and Culture at the Maryland
Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, and a therapist in private practice.
She writes about expressions of the apocalyptic and pathological in contemporary cul-
ture. Her latest book is High Theory, Low Culture (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Florian Cramer studied literature and art history in Berlin, Konstanz and Amherst/Massa-
chusetts. He is course director of the Media Design MA program at the Piet Zwart Institute
in Rotterdam. Cramer writes on literature, arts, computing, and is currently researching
obscene aesthetics.
http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Samantha Culp was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. As an undergraduate at
Yale University, she was a recipient of several arts grants, including a Kingsley Trust Fel-
lowship to film a documentary in the Pacific islands of Micronesia. After graduating with
a BA in Literature, she moved to Hong Kong to teach at the Chinese University as a Yale-
China Fellow. She founded the film screening series “Superplex” at the Chinese Univer-
sity, and writes on contemporary Asian arts and culture for publications such as the South
China Morning Post, Shift, The Fader, and RES. She is currently working on various
writing, curating and film projects, such as a documentary about Chungking Mansions
and an overseas travelling exhibit of young Hong Kong artists for the 10th anniversary of
July 1, 1997. She is also a summer 2007 FUSE Artist-in-Residence at Videotage.
samantha.culp@yale.edu
Barbara DeGenevieve has been a professor of photography at the School of the Art Insti-
tute of Chicago (SAIC) since 1994. She has also taught at the University of Illinois and
California State University, San Jose. Originally known for her work as a photographer,
DeGenevieve has exhibited in Tokyo, Frankfurt, and numerous esteemed galleries in
the USA. She has also lectured at the Glasgow School of Art, CalArts, Rhode Island
School of Design, and New York University.
Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He is the author of Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the
End of the Century (1996) and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
Brink (1999) (www.markdery.com/pyrotechnic_insanitarium.html). His seminal essay
“Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs”, popular-
ised the guerrilla media activism known as “culture jamming”; widely republished on
Section 4: Biographies and webography 287
the web, “Culture Jamming” remains the definitive theorisation of this subcultural phe-
nomenon. In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1993), an academic anthol-
ogy he edited, Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism,” which jump-started the academic
interest in black technoculture. Flame Wars also helped found the discourses of cyber-
feminism and cyberculture studies. Dery teaches in the Department of Journalism at
New York University, where he directs the undergraduate concentration in media criti-
cism. He is at work on Paradise Lust, a book about the online culture war between sexu-
al revolutionaries and the morality police.
markdery@optonline.net
www.markdery.com
Michael Goddard is Professor of English, Cultural and Media Studies at the University
of Lodz, Poland. He has published on Polish and International Cinema, Deleuze’s aes-
thetic theories and radical Italian thought. He is currently preparing a book on the cin-
ema of Raul Ruiz and conducting research into East European postmodern audiovisual
cultures.
Stewart Home was born in south London in 1962. When he was sixteen he held down a
factory job for a few months, an experience that led him to vow he’d never work again.
After dabbling in rock journalism and music in the early 1980s, he switched his atten-
tion to the art world. Now Home writes novels as well as cultural commentary, and he
continues to make films and exhibitions. He has long been an underground legend in
Europe, North America and Brazil.
www.stewarthomesociety.org
Katrien Jacobs is a scholar, writer, artist and activist, and is assistant professor in at City
University of Hong Kong. She has lectured and published widely on digital media, art,
pornography and censorship. She has a PhD degree in comparative literature and media,
with a thesis on dismemberment myths and rituals in 1960s/1970s body art and perfor-
mance media. Her book Libi_doc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art (Maska, 2005),
contains travelogue writing, interviews with 26 international artists, and performative
commentary. Her new book Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics discusses al-
ternative porn domains and will be published by Rowman and Littlfield in Fall 2007.
www.libidot.org
Marije Janssen received her MA degree in new media & genderstudies at the University
of Utrecht in 2006. Thereafter she worked with the Institute of Network Cultures and
Paradiso as the producer of C’Lick Me. She has presented at the Post Porn Politics sym-
posium in Berlin 2006. In her private life she likes to watch gayporn for girls. She also
works as phone operator at the first all-female run escort agency in the Netherlands.
288 C’Lick Me
Regina Lynn is the author of The Sexual Revolution 2.0 (Ulysses Press, 2005) and the
Sex Drive columnist for Wired News. She also runs the Sex Drive forum at ReginaLynn.
com. When not pursuing better sex through technology (or better technology through
sex), she spends time with her chocolate Lab.
www.reginalynn.com
http://blog.wired.com/sex
Mireille Miller-Young, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at University of

California at Santa Barbara. Her research explores the sexual politics of Black women
in the sex industries in the US and the African Diaspora. Her current manuscript in pro-
gress, “A Taste For Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography,” analyses the history
of Black women in the US pornography business, including representational and labor
economies. Dr. Miller-Young researches and teaches about feminist documentary film-
making, sex work and sex cultures, and feminist, queer, and critical race theory. She par-
ticipated in the first netporn conference held in 2005 in Amsterdam by the Institute of
Network Cultures, and a version of her article was first published in Cut-Up Magazine:
www.cut-up.com.
Tim Noonan has been instrumental in providing blind Australians timely access to dai-
ly newspapers and other information over the standard telephone and other channels.
He is a member of two Standards Australia committees as well as having been involved
with the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). Tim
is a professional speaker and is a frequent guest on radio and TV where he engagingly
examines issues of social inclusion and access to emerging technologies. Tim has a BA
majoring in cognitive psychology and special education, and holds a diploma in Thera-
peutic Massage. He has more than twenty years professional experience in issues of ac-
cessibility and the disability field with a special focus on technology.
tim@timnoonan.com.au
www.timnoonan.com.au
www.visionarycommunications.com.au
Francesco Macarone Palmieri, aka Warbear graduated in Cultural Anthropology at La

Sapienza University in Rome. He is an international stimulator of confrontation and
deepenings in fields such as countercultures, urban anthropology, media studies, lite-
rature, art and emotions sociology, cultural studies, queer studies with a focus on por-
nography. Warbear gave life to one of the first Italian bear groups: Epicentro Ursino
Romano, through which he organises activities about gender and masculinity, and pro-
duces the ‘Subwoofer’ bear dance party. He has also created the multilinguistic queer
project ‘Phag Off’. Warbear lives and works in Rome.
www.myspace.com/warbear www.phagoff.org
www.epicentroursino.com
www.tekfestival.it
Matteo Pasquinelli is editor of Rekombinant (www.rekombinant.org) and author of Me-

dia Activism (2002). He has been involved in several projects around net activism and
cultural jamming — from Luther Blissett to Telestreet. He co-curated the Art and Poli-
tics of Netporn conference (2005) and the ‘C’Lick Me festival’ (2007) with the Institute
of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Nomadically inclined, he currently lives and works
between London and Berlin.
matt@rekombinant.org
Audacia Ray is an executive editor of $pread, a magazine by and for sex workers, and is
a contributor to the porn blog Fleshbot. Her first book Naked on the Internet: Hookups,
Downloads and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration, is due June 2007 (Seal Press).
In 2006, Audacia wrote and directed her first feature adult film The Bi Apple, which she
produced in New York City under the auspices of her Waking Vixen Productions. The
film was released by Adam & Eve Pictures in February 2007. She has a BA in Cultural
Studies from Eugene Lang College, and an MA in American Studies from Columbia
University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York
www.wakingvixen.com
Julie Levin Russo is a doctoral candidate in Modern Culture & Media at Brown Univer-
sity, where she is working on a dissertation entitled “Indiscrete Media: TV/Internet Con-
vergence and Economies of Lesbian Fandom” (www.01cyb.org/diss). She has appeared
in several feminist porn vehicles. Her erotic fiction was most recently published in “Best
of Best Lesbian Erotica 2.”
www.01cyb.org
Andreas Schaale (Dr.) is originally a nuclear physicist. As one of the founders of the
company Contraco – Consulting & Software (www.intranetsuche.de) specialising in
search technology, he currently leads its Research and Science division. Among other
things, he develops and publishes on themes such as search- and filter-algorithms for
search machines as well as risk management. Schaale lives and works in Berlin.
Nishant Shah is a Junior Research Scholar exploring cyberspaces for his PhD thesis at
Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. Nishant works as a freelance
information architect and has recently come back from Taiwan where he was a visiting
scholar at the National Central University. Apart from designing and teaching courses
for undergraduate students in new media and urban spaces, Nishant is interested in
questions of gender, identity, modernity, culture, citizenship and new pedagogies for
teaching. In his spare time, he hides behind a keyboard and encrypts his life on cyberspace.
290 C’Lick Me
Tim Stüttgen is author and artist. He holds a BA in Film Studies (London/Berlin) and
is a postgraduate reseracher at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht. Tim writes as a
journalist (Spex, Taz, Jungle World, Texte Zur Kunst, Spiegel Online) and theorist. He
has published writings on Afro-American and Asian popculture, pornography, avant-
garde cinema, queer politics and poststructuralism. At the moment he is editing a read-
er on Deleuze and Guattari (b_books) with Nicolas Siepen, and writing his book post
/ porn / politics after the same titled symposium he organised at Volksbuehne Berlin in
2006. He studies Fine Art at HfbK Hamburg. Under his dragqueen alter ego ‘Timi Mei
Monigatti,’ he has performed in Germany, England, Denmark and the Netherlands.
His recent performative lecture piece is called: “Post Porn Happiness: The Fun Of Cas-
tration.”
www.postpornpolitics.com
Matthew Zook is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University

of Kentucky. His research focuses on the intersection of digital and human geography and
is particularly interested in how technologies like the Internet are interacting with the spa-
tial organisation of economic and social activities. Recent projects include a critical analy-
sis of the promise and constraints of Google Earth, the geography of Nigerian spammers
and the adoption of e-commerce by manufacturing firms. His book The Geography of the
Internet Industry: Venture Capital, Dot-coms and Local Knowledge (Blackwell, 2005) fo-
cuses on the rise and fall of dot com firms in the San Francisco Bay region.
www.zook.info
291
WEBOGRAPHY
Blogs Alt / Indie Porn

Fleshbot Altporn.net
www.fleshbot.com www.altporn.net
Sex Blogs Suicidegirls

www.sexblo.gs www.suicidegirls.com
Regina Lynn Beautiful Agony

www.reginalynn.com www.beautifulagony.com
Tiny Nibbles, by Violet Blue Vivid Alt

www.tinynibbles.com www.vividalt.com
The Reverse Cowgirl, by Susannah Breslin Eon Mckai

www.reversecowgirlblog.blogspot.com www.eonmckai.com
Audacia Ray Joanna Angel

www.wakingvixen.com/blog www.burningangel.com
Mark Dery Dana Dearmond

www.markdery.com www.danadearmond.com
www.danabound.com
Realblog, by Sergio Messina
www.realcore.radiogladio.it Erotique Digitale
www.erotiquedigitale.com
Slashdong
www.slashdong.org Supercult
www.supercult.com
Gram Ponante
www.gramponante.com Apneatic
www.apneatic.com
Sex Kitten: Women and Pornography
www.sex-kitten.net Toxy Wonderland
www.toxywonderland.com
Melissa Gira
www.melissagira.com Candy Poses
www.candyposes.com
Sugar Bank
www.sugarbank.com
292 C’Lick Me
Furry Girl Conferences and Festivals

www.furrygirl.com The Art and Politics of Netporn (2005)
www.networkcultures.org/netporn
Anna The Nerd
www.nerdpron.com C’Lick Me (2007)
www.networkcultures.org/clickme
Queer Porn Sites
Nofauxxx Porn Film Festival Berlin
www.nofauxxx.com (2006)
www.pornfilmfestivalberlin.de
Cyberdykes
www.cyber-dyke.net Post Porn Politics Symposium Berlin
(2006)
Buckangel www.postpornpolitics.com
www.buckangel.com
Porn Ar(t)Ound the World (2001)
Emilie Jouvet www.libidot.org/katrien/tester/
www.onenightstand-thefilm.com happenings.htm
Phag off Research

www.phagoff.org Initiatives
International Committee on the Rights of
Bears Online Sex Workers in Europe
www.bearwww.com www.sexworkeurope.org
Girlswholikeporno Albert Benshop

www.girlswholikeporno.com www2.fmg.uva.nl/sociosite/websoc/
regulation_porno.html
Magazines
Jane’s Net Sex Guide Censorship on the Internet:
www.janesguide.com A Bibliography
http://library2.usask.ca/
Nerve ~dworaczecens.htm
www.nerve.com
Sexual Content in Games
Asian Sex Gazette www.igda.org/sex
www.asiansexgazette.com
Kinsey Institute for Research in sex, Gen-
The Adult Video Industry der and Reproduction website
www.avn.com www.indiana.edu/kinsey
Artists Censorship
Libidot Feminists Against
www.libidot.org Censorship
www.fiawol.demon.co.uk/FAC
Terre Thaemlitz
www.comatonse.com The File Room
www.thefileroom.org
Annie Sprinkle
www.anniesprinkle.org Eletronic Frontier
Foundation
Bruce La Bruce www.eff.org
www.brucelabruce.com
Index on Censorship
Tobaron Waxman www.indexonline.org
www.artic.edu/~twaxma
Electronic Frontiers
Zoot and Genant Australia
www.zootengenant.com www.efa.org.au
Adam Zaretsky and Barbara Groves

www.ovarium.org Feminist Sex Shops
Good Vibrations
Vaginal Davis www.goodvibes.com
www.vaginaldavis.com
Love Piece Club
Todd Verow www.lovepiececlub.com
www.bangorfilms.com
Grandopening
Tanya Bezreh www.grandopening.com
www.tanyabezreh.com
Toys in Babeland
Ian Haig www.babeland.com
www.ianhaig.net
Piepke
www.piepke.org
Timothy Archibald - Sexmachines

www.timothyarchibald.com/
sexmachines.html
296 C’Lick Me
C'LICK ME:
Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2007
C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader is an anthology that

collects the best materials of two years debate: from The Art and
Politics of Netporn conference held in 2005 in Amsterdam to the
2007 C'Lick Me festival. C'Lick Me opens the field of ‘Internet
pornology’. Based on non-conventional approaches, mixing
academics, artists and activists, the C'Lick Me Reader reclaims
a critical post-enthusiastic, post-censorship perspective on
netporn, a dark field that has been dominated thus far by dodgy
commerce and filtering. The C'Lick Me reader covers the rise of
the netporn society from Usenet underground to the blogo-
sphere, analyses economic data and search engines traffic,
compares sex work with the work of fantasy, disability and
accessibility. The C'Lick Me reader also expands the notion of
digital desire, and smashes the predicatable boundaries of porn
debates, depicting a broader libidinal spectrum from fetish
subcultures to digital alienation, from code pornography to war
pornography. The reader concludes by re-contextualising the
queer discourse into a post-porn scenario.
Contributions by: Adam Arvidsson, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Manuel

Bonik, Mikita Brottman, Florian Cramer, Samantha Culp, Barbara
DeGenevieve, Mark Dery, Michael Goddard, Stewart Home,
Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Julie Levin Russo, Regina Lynn,
Sergio Messina, Mireille Miller-Young, Tim Noonan, Francesco
Macarone Palmieri aka Warbear, Matteo Pasquinelli, Audacia Ray,
Andreas Schaale, Nishant Shah, Tim Stüttgen, Matthew Zook.
ISBN: 978-90-78146-03-2
PARADISO
AMSTERDAM • HOLLAND

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A NETPORN STUDIES READER

Edited by Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Matteo Pasquinelli

Edited by Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Matteo Pasquinelli

Order a copy of this book by sending an email

A PDF of this publication can be downloaded

Section 1: The Rise of the Netporn Society

Manuel Bonik and Andreas Schaale

Section 2: Digital Desire beyond Pornography

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

SECTION 3: Netporn after the Queer Boom

Julie Levin Russo

Francesco Macarone Palmieri aka Warbear

THE RISE OF THE NETPORN SOCIETY

It’s a challenge, and I love it.

Our initial conversation went something like this:

Me: You need me to write a weekly sex-tech column!

Producer: Can you start Monday?

My new editor all but demanded I write about this.

For the Love of Cybersex

And the Tech Shall Set You Free

Where Sex and Tech Intersect

That’s probably why my favorite sexual imagery involves tech. FuckingMachines.com

You Say You Want a Revolution

Sergio Messina has seen the future, and it’s sticky.

MD: What inspired you to coin the term “Realcore”?

Photoshopped tribute. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina.

MD: Again, very Baudrillardian: the precession of the stimulacra. Or is it sem-ula-

MD: It reminded me of a Dutch master’s portrait of a self-satisfied burgher, surrounded

MD: Do what extent do you — and/or they — see their autobiographical or documentary

I hope to formulate the two differently in the course of this essay.

Sex in the Cyber-City

Once a-porn a time…

The last stroke

structed for a notion of public participation. It would be misleading to say that

Ghai, S. (Director), Khalnayak, Mukta Arts Productions, 1996.

Gibson, W. (1984) Neuromancer, New York: Ace Books.

Jenks, C. (1996) Childhood, London, Routledge.

Nataro, A. Introduction to the Blogosphere, forthcoming.

Rajadhyaksha, A. (2004) work in progress presented at CSCS, Bangalore on 12-09-04.

Reid, E. (1994) Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities, Master’s thesis,

Willemen, P. (2003) “For a Pornoscape” in More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography

Sex on the Open Market:

The Old Guard Goes High Tech

Class and a New Generation of Workers

Pitching the Persona

Dish and Bitch: The Message Boards

The False Veil of Secrecy

On the boards, which participants view as private, membership-based spaces that

I’ve Got Your Back

Message Boards and Bad-Date Lists

High Tech Verification

Sex Worker Activism

BEVERLY FISHER: Denver-based escort and writer.

ROOM SERVICE 2000 AND DATE-CHECK: Websites that offer client-verification

UTOPIAGUIDE, BIG DOGGIE, THE EROTIC REVIEW (TER): Message board

‘The industrialization, through home computers, of physical and psychical care

‘We sell an idea. On the street they sell pieces of meat.’

The (immaterial) labour of fantasy

Conclusion: The FetishBrand

the hyper-reality of porn — with its streamlined fashions and standardised practices — is

Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Cronin, B. and E. Davenport (2001) ‘E-rogenous Zones: Positioning Pornography in the

Dieuaide, D. (2006), ‘Diffusione delle TIC, cambiamento dell’organizzazione e svilup-